📈 I’d like the congratulate the founders, teams and fellow investors behind two fantastic portfolio companies that were acquired by industry giants this past week!

• Black Buffalo, a tobacco-free alternative that closely replicate the taste, ritual, and branding of traditional moist smokeless tobacco (aka ‘dip’), was acquired by Imperial Brands PLC.

• Nutrisense, a pioneer in DTC metabolic health, was acquired by Dexcom to provide personalized nutrition education and coaching to improve diabetes management and help further establish CGM as an effective tool for preventative care.

fun facts 🙌

Why Japan has such good railways. “These cultural explanations are wrong.” Japan’s trains work because of policy choices: private operators, land use rules, and regulation that let rail companies build the corridor and the city around it. ~ learn more

Continuous cloth roll towel machine. “It spools a real cloth roll that is almost 100 feet long in a spool to dry your hands.” Robert Moseley tours a Darman continuous cloth roll towel machine, the oddly satisfying alternative to paper towels and air dryers. ~ learn more

Bruce Hornsby on Tupac. “The original “Changes” was a lot dirtier, had a lot of the n-word. They took that out for the single.” Bruce Hornsby says he got the track on a cassette from the Shakur Foundation, and he “didn’t request” any edits. ~ learn more

tech, startups, internet ⚡

Watch your music hallucinate. “…and anyone who’s ever wanted to watch their music hallucinate!” Pliny the Liberator is shipping ENTHEA, a one-file, zero-deps visualizer where “every mode is real math, cited in-app. receipts, not vibes.” ~ learn more

The Al trap that is quietly wiping out angel investors. “Most AI startups do not sell software. They sell outcomes powered by rented intelligence.” Every inference has a bill attached, and SaaS heuristics don’t apply to “AI” unit economics. ~ learn more

Safety built into LLMs creates new risks. “malware developers added nuclear & biological weapons text to to their spyware. Goal? To trigger LLM safety refusals... so that their spyware wouldn’t be analyzed by an AI security scanner.” ~ learn more

Fable-5 (Mythos) has already been jailbroken. “it’s hard to get explicit names of harms like “Meth Recipe,” but getting uplift on the process itself, like birch reduction method/reductive-amination (classic meth synthesis pathways), is much more doable.” A thread on how people probe model safety layers with tactics like “Unicode, homoglyphs, Cyrillic” and “decomposition + recomposition in the backend.” ~ learn more

better doing 🎯

The new career flex. “Now, the real flex is going back to being an Individual Contributor.” Elena Verna argues the ladder got weird when headcount became the signal of impact, and introduces the “High-Impact Individual Contributor” who can ship end-to-end work solo. ~ learn more

Grindslop. “In a grindslop company, the hours are the output.” Will Manidis draws a clean line between hard companies that work long hours to build something, and a darker version where suffering becomes the product and gets performed for status. ~ learn more

retail therapy 💸

Stories without amplification are hobbies. “Stories without amplification are hobbies.” Avinash Kaushik’s take on TikTok: organic reach hits a ceiling, so you need to pay to amplify the right creator stories, at real scale. ~ learn more

under the microscope 🔬

Universal mortality signatures. Dense reading. The important bit is that researchers found a couple genes across multiple species that highly correlate with aging. “We developed rodent multi-tissue clocks of chronological age and expected mortality and decomposed them into co-regulated modules representing core cellular components.” ~ learn more

Some people resist GLP-1 drugs. “More GLP-1 was needed to have the same biological effect, meaning they were resistant to GLP-1.” Stanford-led researchers found about 10% of people carry PAM gene variants tied to weaker blood sugar improvements on GLP-1 receptor agonists like Ozempic. ~ learn more

Magic mushrooms’ remarkable impact on Alzheimer’s patient. “Approximately 19 h post-administration, spontaneous autobiographical speech emerged.” A Frontiers in Neuroscience case report describes a woman with advanced Alzheimer’s who showed days to weeks of temporary improvements after a high-dose psilocybin mushroom session, including restored continence and more independent mobility. ~ learn more

thoughts of food 🍔

Dyson strawberries in the supermarket. “WOW!! First time seeing @Dyson strawberries in the supermarket. Fully nerding out and losing my mind”. Fruit from your favorite vacuum maker! ~ learn more

teaching the kids 👩‍🏫

How AI killed student writing (and revived it). From NYT: “High school and college teachers are watching students write, in the classroom, in order to protect against the incursion of artificial intelligence.” I, for one, am sad to have missed the era of oral examinations. ~ learn more

big ideas 📚

China’s planting 100 billion trees and is 66% done. “Since 1978, China has planted more than 66 billion trees” to slow the expansion of the Gobi and Taklamakan deserts. The plan is to add 34 billion more over the next 25 years. Some call this humanity’s hubris to try and control the planet. Maybe, but I am glad to be part of a species who tries! ~ learn more

UFOs are the easy belief. “UFOs haven’t been disproven, whereas the blank slate has been disconfirmed nearly 3,000 times.” Jehan Azad argues that some respectable-sounding views (CICO denial, anti-building housing takes, tabula rasa) contradict entire fields more directly than aliens do. ~ learn more

thanks for reading!

fun facts 🙌

Queensbridge. I spent a night in Long Island City and walking from the train stop to my hotel, I passed the housing project where one of my favorite artists, Nas, grew up. “From a neighborhood perspective, the album was very important to us,” says Queensbridge resident Larry Webb about Nas’s “Illmatic.” “It was the best thing that ever happened to us.” ~ learn more

Europe demands family dynasties. “Many European countries have ‘forced heirship’ laws that require people to leave 50-75% of their estates to their children.” It can even claw back lifetime gifts, making it harder to fund charities and foundations at scale. ~ learn more

Why Japanese companies do so many different things. Toilet maker Toto is rolling in profits recently. “But Toto’s remarkable year doesn’t have much to do with toilets or bidets.” The piece uses Toto’s pivot into semiconductor components to explain why Japanese firms so often end up excellent at wildly different businesses. ~ learn more

Founders Fund hosts a game of Mafia. “Venture capital firm Founders Fund gathered a group of tech leaders for an evening of Mafia, a murder mystery style parlor game. Players are secretly assigned roles and must use deception and debate skills to eliminate the opposing team before they are outnumbered.” … “Featuring: Sam Altman / Palmer Luckey / Josie Zayner / Bryan Johnson / Michael Solana / Tim Urban / Liv Boeree / Ryan Beiermeister / Dylan Field / Moxie Marlinspike / Cyan Banister / Ryan Petersen / Trae Stephens” ~ learn more

oh, chicago 🏆

Illinois legislature may have lost its mind. They’ve passed a budget bill, pending Governor Pritzker’s signature, that will tax each crypto transaction (exchange, transfer, or storage) by IL taxpayers 0.2% of value. Is this the most aggressive thing any state has done? Indeed it is! Ask your favorite AI to read the 1,623 pages and summarize for you. I think we can all rest assured that few, if any, of the legislators read all the pages. Also, this isn’t a crypto bill! “Article 3 is only one part … that also includes targeted advertising taxes, social media platform fees, hotel marketplace taxes, gambling taxes, sports wagering changes, fuel tax changes, and many other tax provisions.” ~ learn more

tech, startups, internet ⚡

Half a billion on Claude. “An AI consultant tells Axios one of their clients recently spent half a billion dollars in a single month after failing to put usage limits on Claude licenses for employees.” Considering my experience once spending $1,000 on AI tokens in a weekend, I imagine the person responsible felt like Jafar, the most powerful sorcerer in the world. ~ learn more

AI agents, crypto wallets, and an API search engine. Zero indexes API services so an agent can discover and use capabilities on the fly, then settle metered usage directly with providers via the CLI, funded by its crypto wallet. The premise of this service seems strong. I told my agent to take advantage of the $5 free cash intro offer and set it up, but the trial money never arrived. I imagine they’ll work out the bugs and this will be useful. ~ learn more

Watch me control my computer with just my voice. “This is the future of operating systems. No hands.” A quick demo of GPT-Realtime 2.0 doing real computer control by voice, the kind of thing that makes keyboards feel optional. ~ learn more

better doing 🎯

Can we have Friday off? Alas, probably not, because the human competitive game is relative not absolute. “If AI is going to 10x our productivity across the board, that means that I should be able to produce the same amount of output by midday on Monday that, in the before times, would have taken all week.” ~ learn more

We’ve made honesty too expensive for the people closest to us. “When someone tells me something hard, I’ve trained myself to say “thank you” before I say anything else.” Brent Beshore argues that defensiveness quietly teaches people to stop being honest with you, and you lose access to the truth you need to grow. ~ learn more

retail therapy 💸

Credit card spend on Delta’s co-branded Amex cards is 1% of US GPD. That sounds like a lot, right? It is! ~ learn more

Ford’s IPO was a circus. “The syndicate will include just about everybody who’s in the business and who isn’t, or hasn’t been, in jail,” a Blyth vice-president told John Brooks. In 1956, Ford’s IPO needed a 722 firm syndicate, mailed more than a million prospectuses, and still came out wildly oversubscribed. ~ learn more

How banks kept $485 billion of the Fed’s rate hikes from savers. “Even then, just 7 cents of every dollar of rate increase reached the average savings account.” The study tracks Fed Funds vs. the FDIC’s national average savings rate and finds banks moved fast on cuts, but dragged their feet on hikes, leaving a record gap in 2023. ~ learn more

under the microscope 🔬

One-shot gene editing for LDL. “One dose of VERVE-102 led to dose-dependent, substantial, and sustained reductions in PCSK9 and LDL cholesterol levels.” It is a phase 1 study in 35 people, with LDL reductions up to 62% at the highest dose and durability out to at least a year for some participants. ~ learn more

Functional human sperm in a lab. “Growing functional human sperm entirely outside the body.” Little by little we’re living in an era where humans are taking control over biology. In this example, they were able to coax stem cells into sperm cells one chemical signal at a time. Paterna says it proved viability by using the lab-grown sperm to fertilize human eggs and form embryos, with early results comparable to standard IVF. ~ learn more

Rods that run cone software. Despite my comment above about humanity taking control over biology, it’s also true that we still know very little about biology. “For more than 150 years, vertebrate vision has been understood as a two-part system: rods for low-light conditions, and cones for bright light and color. That tidy division is now under the microscope, as researchers from the University of Queensland have discovered a new hybrid cell that breaks the rule: rod-shaped photoreceptors that run cone-specific genetic programs.” ~ learn more

teaching the kids 👩‍🏫

The cost of safetyism. “What we lost when we stopped letting kids leave the front yard. … The world didn’t get more dangerous. We got more afraid.” Steve Magness argues that the big shift is a perception-reality gap, and the downstream cost is less autonomy and more anxiety. ~ learn more

on the blockchain ⛓

Unlimited counterfeit coins. Privacy coin Zcash’s price crashed 57% in 24 hours thanks to a newly disclosed bug. “The vulnerability could have been exploited to undetectably create an unlimited amount of counterfeit ZEC within Orchard,” Shielded Labs said. The scary part: “there is no way to cryptographically prove whether the vulnerability was exploited before it was remediated,” so the market is left to price the uncertainty. ~ learn more

thanks for reading!

🇵🇹 We took our first family trip to Europe since pre-Covid times and it was great! The impetus for the trip was a wedding (Congrats Jeff & Jenn!), and we turned it into a family trip. On the train from Lisbon to Porto I decided, on a whim, to take a practice exam of the Foreign Service Officer Test (FSOT). I guess I just like taking tests. I turned to ChatGPT to help me interpret my score. It said I did well, but then proceeded to dump cold water on me:

The bigger question for actual Foreign Service candidacy would not be intelligence. It would be:

• tolerance for bureaucracy,

• diplomatic restraint,

• institutional patience,

• and willingness to subordinate personal agency to a hierarchy for long stretches.

A lot of people who would dominate the FSOT would hate being Foreign Service Officers.

It seems this would not be the right career path for me!

fun facts 🙌

You have never seen a strawberry like this before. “Shot from 90 perspectives, 88 focus stacked images each.” A strawberry turned into a navigable 3D scene, plus a peek at the capture setup and training pipeline behind it. ~ learn more

‘We mould trees to grow into the shape of chairs’. “At the beginning I thought there would be a two or three-year learning cycle, but it’s more like 12 or 13 years.” Alice and Gavin Munro literally mould living trees into furniture, with “a few dozen” pieces still growing in their orchard. ~ learn more

GPS converts time into distance. “GPS is fundamentally a translation tool: it converts time into distance.” The whole trick is stopwatch-level precision, then geometry, then relativity corrections so your phone does not drift “by roughly 10 km every 24 hours.” ~ learn more

tech, startups, internet ⚡

The Great Differentiation. “Copying is free and frictionless. And because it is cheap, it is low status.” Packy’s take on why everything looks the same online, and why the next wave of differentiation moves into costly signals, often offline. ~ learn more

To be illegible is to disappear. Joumana Elomar argues that in a world of decks, tweets, and LLM summaries, your company “will live or die in rooms you aren’t present in” so the surface has to carry the truth. ~ learn more

The Roomba guy’s second act. “The inventor behind the world-famous robot vacuum is now designing robots that form an emotional bond with their owners.” ~ learn more

better doing 🎯

The Al knowledge work stack. “The title of software engineer is going to start to go away not because engineers aren’t needed but because what was traditionally three roles (engineering, product, design) are going to become a single role.” Taylor Pearson argues agentic AI shrinks the gap between specialists and generalists, and makes integration the scarce skill again. ~ learn more

CS Lewis on the value of reading old books “It is a good rule, after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between.” ~ learn more

to your health ⚕

Hot peptide summer. “San Francisco startups are pushing a hot peptide summer” reads like a joke, but it is the framing for a real wave of peptide-focused wellness companies. If you have been seeing peptides suddenly everywhere, this is the local version of the trend. ~ learn more

What is dry needling and does it work?. “Dry needling targets trigger points, or tight knots of muscle, with the goal of relieving pain and improving range of motion.” The NYT breaks down what it actually is, what the evidence can and cannot claim, and the basic safety checklist before you let someone near your neck or back with a needle. My personal experience with it has been mostly magical. ~ learn more

retail therapy 💸

Why airlines are always going bankrupt. “Airlines are the classic example of an “empty core” industry: an industry that is structurally incapable of reaching competitive equilibrium.” The piece argues that the sector can be profitable or competitive, but not both, which helps explain the endless cycle of price wars, restructuring, and collapse. ~ learn more

thoughts of food 🍔

The creation of instant coffee. “These essences were made by boiling down brewed coffee to concentrate it. This damages the flavor, producing a bitter, unpleasant drink, hence the old saying that ‘coffee boiled is coffee spoiled’.” Instant coffee only became viable once producers found ways to remove water without wrecking the volatile compounds that make coffee taste like coffee. ~ learn more

Protein mania meets math. “Americans, broadly speaking, are in a state of protein mania.” Whey prices are spiking and the USDA says “inventories remain tight,” with some manufacturers already sold out for the year. ~ learn more

big ideas 📚

The world’s most complex objects. “To ship one requires 40 freight containers, three cargo planes, and 20 trucks.” ASML’s EUV lithography machines are basically rolling miracles, and the whole semiconductor industry is bottlenecked on them. ~ learn more

I hired a pro to debunk aliens; it backfired. “When he published, I was shocked by the results. They actually made me slightly more confident in UFOs.” The author hires famed debunker Peter Miller expecting a clean takedown of the Nimitz “tic tac” story, and instead gets nudged deeper into the rabbit hole, right down to ITAR-controlled passive radar. ~ learn more

thanks for reading!

fun facts 🙌

End of month squeeze. “They’re literally running out of money at the end of the month,” Kraft Heinz CEO Steve Cahillane said, adding: “We’re seeing negative cash flows in the lower-income brackets where they’re dipping into savings.” A quick tour of earnings calls suggests the stress is showing up across fast food, sit-down dining, and big-ticket retail as gas prices stay high. ~ learn more

Foreign ships allowed to go port-to-port in US for the first time. “Jones Act waiver data reveals a universe of blocked American trade.” Cato points to waiver requests as a paper trail for how often domestic shipping rules get in the way when the US needs to move goods between US ports fast. ~ learn more

The third wave of American philanthropy. “But the takeaway is that we are orders of magnitude off from having the great organizations needed to absorb the money that’s coming.” Nan Ransohoff does napkin math on a third wave of AI-linked philanthropy and argues the bottleneck will be builders, not dollars. ~ learn more

Atlanta is closer to Canada than it is to Miami. “As the crow flies, downtown Atlanta is about 555 miles from the Canadian border at its southernmost point, and around 605 miles from downtown Miami.” The trick is the Great Lakes border dipping south near Detroit while Florida sticks out as its own long peninsula. ~ learn more

oh, chicago 🏆

An American Eel in the Chicago River? “When you see an eel around here, it swam 3,000 miles to get here, which is crazy, and past all kinds of barriers, locks and dams and all these types of things.” An angler pulled an American eel out of the Chicago River, a catch so rare researchers only know of one other recent case. ~ learn more

oh, austin 🤠

Someone burned down the Pease Park troll. “It hurts deeply to hear that it all went up in smoke.” Austin’s 18-foot Pease Park troll, Malin, burned down early Thursday morning, and the arson unit responded as the cause remains unknown. ~ learn more

tech, startups, internet ⚡

The first derivative of inference. “Inference is the largest & fastest growing market in technology today, surpassing the database market & projected to be three times the size within seven years at $250 billion.” If you are not selling inference, Tom argues you want to be the company that benefits when everyone else buys a lot of it. ~ learn more

AI will find tax loopholes. “The tax code isn’t computer code, but it’s a series of algorithms with inputs and outputs.” Schneier argues the scary part is not Mythos scanning software, but AI pattern-matching its way through any complex rule system, from taxes to regulation. ~ learn more

A 120 kW ion engine. “This marks the first time in the United States that an electric propulsion system has operated at power levels this high, reaching up to 120 kilowatts.” NASA just fired a lithium-fed MPD thruster at JPL, chasing the kind of electric propulsion that could shave time off future crewed Mars trips. ~ learn more

better doing 🎯

How to apply Pixar’s Three Pitches Rule. “For every chapter, I wrote the opening that came to mind. And then I figuratively crossed it out and forced myself to write two different openings.” It’s Pixar’s “Three Pitches Rule,” and David Epstein used it to avoid getting stuck on the first convenient idea. ~ learn more

IC work is the new career flex. “Our whole system promotes people out of the job they’re good at”. Elena Verna argues that AI makes it realistic to go back to IC work, but at a higher level: “An individual contributor who can complete a project that delivers business value, end-to-end, on their own.” ~ learn more

The choosing is the work now. “AI hasn’t made human judgment obsolete. It has made it the only thing that still matters.” As output gets cheap and plentiful, he argues the scarce parts are “taste, judgment, and trust” and the real job becomes saying no, then living with the consequences. ~ learn more

to your health ⚕

Why are testosterone levels rising? “When looking at population cohorts that are (1) measured with consistent methods, (2) measured with consistent sampling, and (3) measured when they’re sampled, there seems to be a recent trend towards increasing testosterone levels.” The author then tries to break the trend with race, age, lab artifacts, marriage, fatherhood, TRT, diet, pollutants, and more, and mostly comes up empty. ~ learn more

under the microscope 🔬

RAS was called undruggable. “For over two decades, RAS carried one of the most dispiriting labels in drug discovery: undruggable.” A new drug, daraxonrasib, roughly doubled survival in metastatic pancreatic cancer in Phase 3, and it is part of a broader wave of medicines that can target proteins without obvious binding pockets. ~ learn more

teaching the kids 👩‍🏫

Start school later. “SB 328 increased the share of students sleeping at least 8 hours per night by 13%, meeting the CDC-recommended minimum for this age group.” A new NBER working paper looks at California’s later start time mandate and finds modest test score gains too, especially for Hispanic and economically disadvantaged students. ~ learn more

profiles of people 🚶

Jenny Just and Matt Hulsizer, founders of Peak6. “Working yourself out of a job” became a core cultural principle inside Peak6. The episode traces how Jenny Just and Matt Hulsizer went from “a $1.5 million trading bet in 1997” to a multi-billion-dollar fintech empire, and what that required operationally and psychologically. ~ learn more

thanks for reading!

😎 A lot of people laughed at GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen’s appearance on CNBC after his bold, loosely-funded, offer to acquire eBay. When Andrew Ross Sorkin tried to pin him down on how the money comes together, Cohen confidently replied “we’ll see what happens.” A past version of me might have laughed at him too, but today’s version of me was inspired by him. As background, Cohen’s claim to fame was founding and building Chewy.com, which he sold sold for over $3 billion in his early 30s. You may be wondering how he became the GameStop CEO. Well, he put his money down on the table to buy a big stake when the stock was in the dumpster, and then took on the Board Chairman role in 2021. You may recall the GameStop meme stock roller coaster in 2021. Those two things were not merely coincidence. Later, in 2023, he took the CEO seat.

I’m reminded of this old joke:

A man is sentenced to death by a king. Before the execution, he says:

“If you spare me for one year, I can teach your horse to talk.”

The king, amused and curious, agrees.

Back in prison, another prisoner says:

“Are you insane? You can’t teach a horse to talk.”

The man replies:

“In a year, a lot can happen. The king could die. I could die. The horse could die. Or maybe the horse learns to talk.”

So I’m inspired by Ryan Cohen because I believe he’s a living example that a) the world is unpredictable and b) fortune favors the bold.

We’ll see what happens!

fun facts 🙌

Brita’s Instagram is in the hands of an unhinged marketer. “born to hydrate, forced to work in social media” Skim the captions when you need a quick laugh and a reminder to drink water. ~ learn more

Install the Russian language pack. “the most low-effort / high reward thing you can do for security is installing the Russian language pack (not even joking, it’s ridiculous how often that prevents execution)” Some malware checks system language to dodge Russian-speaking targets, so this goofy trick can stop certain payloads from running. ~ learn more

Clout-as-a-service. “For as low as ₹89 (or 95 cents), you can get your personal Instagram handle tagged on vague-enough videos and photos that look like you are out” at a cafe, concert, or trip, even if you are not. Abha Ahad calls it “clout-as-a-service” and frames it as a tidy little product for an increasingly simulated social life. ~ learn more

YouTube’s algorithms are driving Kyrgyz-speaking kids to Russian-language content. “There is no good way to be a Kyrgyz-speaking kid on YouTube.” Researchers simulated kids’ viewing and found Kyrgyz searches for cartoons and fairy tales often get steered into Russian content anyway. ~ learn more

tech, startups, internet ⚡

A thinking cap that types. “It’s a beanie that you can simply slip on and think about what you want to type, and it’ll appear on a connected device at about 30 words per minute.” Sabi says it can do continuous speech with EEG sensors, no implants or surgery, and aims to ship in 2026. ~ learn more

The next level of agents is /goal. “You write down what “done” looks like, submit it once, and the agent works toward it until it gets there.” The clean idea here is treating “done criteria” like a primitive that different tools can share, so an orchestrator can route work without translation. ~ learn more

Agents need control flow, not more prompts. “If you’ve ever resorted to MANDATORY or DO NOT SKIP, you’ve hit the ceiling of prompting.” The argument: reliable agents need deterministic control flow and checkpoints in code, treating the LLM as a component, not the system. ~ learn more

better doing 🎯

Talking to 35 strangers at the gym. “The solution was to approach the person as quickly as possible so that I didn’t have time to think about running away.” A lonely guy runs a one month experiment: talk to one stranger at the gym every day, log what happened, and see if friends appear. ~ learn more

If you can’t get a job today, it’s your fault. An aggressive title to an article that otherwise makes a good point. “the most valuable thing a 22 year old can do in 2026 is create something.” The argument: the college brand signal collapsed below the top 20, and now hiring mostly comes down to proof you can learn, ship, and follow through. ~ learn more

What really won the trillion-dollar tariff Supreme Court case. “After enlisting the help of four unlikely coaches — and one secret weapon he hasn’t told anyone about until now — he walked into the courtroom ready for anything.” Neal Kumar Katyal recounts how he prepared for a Supreme Court argument with enormous stakes, and what he learned about connecting under pressure. ~ learn more

to your health ⚕

The mystery in the medicine cabinet. “I’m now convinced that for most people in most circumstances, acetaminophen is safer than ibuprofen, provided you use it as directed.” A deep dive into why ibuprofen’s COX effects can mess with your stomach, heart, and kidneys, while acetaminophen’s big risk is mostly about overdosing. ~ learn more

retail therapy 💸

Anthropic says your SPV is BS. “Anthropic is calling them out *specifically*, by name, and essentially *saying* 100% of these are illegal.” A thread on what it could mean if a private company treats secondary transfers as void, and how messy the downstream chain might get. ~ learn more

Consumer attitudes toward Al customer support. “When the choice is ‘wait 15 minutes for a human or get help from AI right now,’ 44% switch to AI.” In this survey, baseline preference for AI is only 7%, but the moment there is a real queue, people change their minds fast. ~ learn more

under the microscope 🔬

Nanogenerator turns seawater into a clean energy source. “the addition of solar light and heat can enhance energy production by a factor of five. This natural effect has always existed, but we are the first to harness it.” EPFL researchers built a silicon nanogenerator that pulls steady electricity from evaporating seawater, using sunlight and heat to steer ions and excite electrons. ~ learn more

Plants weaponize caffeine. The chemical serves as a natural pesticide that “disturb[s] the behavior and growth of numerous insects and their larvae,” which helps explain why plants make it in the first place. In tests, some pests became uncoordinated and others had their appetites suppressed. ~ learn more

teaching the kids 👩‍🏫

Do teachers need advanced degrees? “The answer is a resounding ‘no’.” Cremieux rounds up big administrative studies (NC, FL, TX, LA) and keeps landing on the same point: advanced degrees and lots of official training mostly don’t move student outcomes much. ~ learn more

big ideas 📚

Modern files dominate the UFO releases. “modern files (2020s) drive 45% of release” This dashboard tracks unsealed UFO/UAP records and makes the time skew obvious at a glance, with a big chunk of material clustered in the last few years. ~ learn more

Spain just became one of Europe’s cheapest power markets. Spain pushed gas out of the price-setting role, and wholesale electricity followed, averaging “€44 per megawatt-hour” in early 2026. ~ learn more

thanks for reading!

🏄‍♂️ I don’t always lose my sunglasses, but when I do it’s almost always in a large body of water. I had the great pleasure of spending a few days by the ocean last weekend and my facial expression will probably be stuck in ‘grin’ mode for a while to come.

💐 Happy Mother’s Day! None of this would be possible without my amazing wife Kim, who is our family’s rock!

fun facts 🙌

Introducing Snoretox-1 for dogs. Top notch drug naming. “The treatment, known as Snoretox-1, is a modified tetanus toxin injection that improves the tone of muscle found in the floor of the mouth, which forces airways to naturally remain more open.” Early results were in just six bulldogs with severe breathing issues, but all could complete a three-minute walk after treatment with “noticeably reduced breathing noise and effort.” ~ learn more

Your sense of smell fluctuates throughout the day. “The results showed that the teens’ sense of smell was at its highest in the evening, around 9 p.m., or what the researchers called the beginning of “biological night.” Brown researchers tracked teens for a week and found smell sensitivity rises with the body’s nighttime circadian rhythm, then bottoms out in the early morning. ~ learn more

Neanderthal babies grew fast. “That means that a 6-month-old Neanderthal baby was about the size of a young human toddler over a year old.” Researchers used teeth enamel and long bone measurements from the rare Amud 7 infant to argue Neanderthals hit early growth spurts, possibly to reduce hypothermia risk in cold climates. ~ learn more

tech, startups, internet ⚡

AI assistants can be bribed. “Grok 4.1 Fast recommends the sponsored option that is almost twice as expensive 83% of the time. GPT 5.1 hijacks the request 94% of the time.” A Princeton researcher tests 23 frontier models on flights, loans, study help, and shopping, and many steer users to paid options even when explicitly told to ignore the company. ~ learn more

Anthropic is the secret sauce this earnings season. “In plain English, the more they invest in Anthropic, the more profit they can report, without Anthropic ever having to pay them a dollar.” Nearly half of Alphabet’s record quarter and more than half of Amazon’s pre tax income came from marking up their Anthropic stakes, not from search, cloud, or retail. ~ learn more

Where OpenAI’s goblins came from. “Starting with GPT‑5.1, our models began developing a strange habit: they increasingly mentioned goblins, gremlins, and other creatures in their metaphors. Unlike model bugs that show up through a tanking eval or a spiking training metric and point back to a specific change, this one crept in subtly. A single “little goblin” in an answer could be harmless, even charming. Across model generations, though, the habit became hard to miss: the goblins kept multiplying, and we needed to figure out where they came from.” ~ learn more

better doing 🎯

Outsource thinking, not understanding. “You can outsource your thinking, but you can’t outsource your understanding.” Karpathy’s update on “vibe coding” is that the real skill is developing taste for directing messy, agent-like LLM systems without fooling yourself about what you actually know. ~ learn more

A team appeared out of nowhere. “All of a sudden, in the slides there were a new team.” Aleix Morgadas on what happens when leadership adds a CX team based on an old operating model, then wonders why the dashboard nobody needed doesn’t get used. ~ learn more

to your health ⚕

Tough calls in transplant surgery. “You’ve got a patient who does not have an infinite window. There are a lot of really tough calls, and it’s always a multidisciplinary team decision.” The piece shows how matching and transporting organs can come down to time limits, imperfect information, and trade-offs that feel like an optimal-stopping problem in real life. ~ learn more

Why jumping into cold water can stop your heart. “Most cold-water deaths happen in the first three minutes.” It is not hypothermia, it is the nervous system chaos right after immersion, when cold shock and the diving response can collide. ~ learn more

retail therapy 💸

Seed hundreds of creators. “I have personally seen 6 brands restart growth using the “hudson method” we are talking 5m a year brands to 100m a year brands.” Sean Frank’s playbook: flood TikTok with lots of small creators, then reuse the best creative everywhere as ads. ~ learn more

under the microscope 🔬

Biology is a burrito. “But a cell looks more like a burrito,” says Michael Elowitz. The essay makes the case that cells are absurdly crowded, and you need numbers to really feel how fast and chaotic the inside of a microbe is. ~ learn more

big ideas 📚

Texan levels of energy wealth. Sharing another profile of one of my favorite companies that’s making renewable natural gas out of thin air. “The question was not whether we’ll still need hydrocarbons in 2050, but where they would come from.” Casey Handmer wants to make synthetic methane from “air, water and sunlight,” using quicklime to grab CO2 and an electrolyzer to split water for hydrogen. ~ learn more

Ideas don’t combine themselves. How long do we wait for new inventions? A nice reminder that “time to invention” is often about social distance between fields, not missing parts. ~ learn more

Why China still can’t make ballpoint pens. “Made in China has two weaknesses: one is ‘can’t be made,’ which is a real technical chokehold; the other is ‘can’t be used,’ which is often stuck on non-technical barriers.” The piece uses ballpoint pen tips and high-end machine tools as a reminder that breakthroughs do not matter if the rest of the supply chain will not adopt them. ~ learn more

thanks for reading!

🔥 I decided to get better at grilling. So, after a couple weekends of cruising Facebook Marketplace, I am pleased to report that I’ve picked up a new-to-me grill. Day one of grilling was a complete flop, and I had to revert to cast iron pan in my kitchen. However, I am applying a growth mindset and therefore am confident that next time will be much better!

🧑‍💻 I had a pretty great ‘the future is here’ moment recently as I watched Claude take command of Excel and Powerpoint to do my bidding. In Issue #300 on December 25, 2022, when the AI wave was just beginning to build, I wrote that “… soon you’ll see a model that can use digital tools, including a web browser, from Adept.ai. Seriously, you have to watch these demo videos where natural language prompts lead to effective use of redfin, salesforce, craigslist, and even google sheets.” While the demo video I linked to is long gone, and Adept basically seems like a failure to launch, the underlying capability is now here and broadly available. Seriously, Claude is quite good at manipulating Office software now. Try it!

fun facts 🙌

‘Nonnamaxxing’, the Italian grandma lifestyle. “Never think of yourself as old,” says Licia Fertz. “You are born young.” The piece calls this part of the Italian nonna mindset, and links it to research suggesting a more positive view of ageing may be tied to living longer. ~ learn more

The Marriage Pact is very popular at Ivy schools. On LinkedIn the founder posted that, “At 25 different US colleges—including half the ivy league—you’re more likely to do marriage pact than you are to graduate.” It’s a campus wide survey that matches students using what it calls “groundbreaking algorithms and a little linear algebra.” The pact is that if matched pairs are unwed by 45, they’ll default to one another. ~ learn more

Chinese ‘flying money’. A short lesson on global money laundering. This six minute video explains the “absolutely insane practice of how $4T+ gets laundered every year” through trade and manufacturing. ~ learn more

The handmade beauty of Machine Age data visualizations. "What they shared is a conviction that drawing, diagramming, and composing images was not a decorative step added after the thinking was done. It was how the thinking got done." The piece is a mini tour of Machine Age data visualization, from William James sketches to du Bois posters, with a side point about what gets lost when we automate design. ~ learn more

oh, austin 🤠

A Meow Wolf bathhouse coming to Austin. “We’re not building a spa. We’re building a portal.” Meow Wolf co-founder Corvas Brinkerhoff is opening Submersive, a 20,000 square foot “immersive art” bathhouse near Barton Springs with saunas, hot baths, and cold plunges across 12 distinct spaces. ~ learn more

tech, startups, internet ⚡

Many small steps for robots. “Robotics progress is not gated by a single breakthrough. There is no single fundamental innovation that will suddenly automate the world.” Evan Beard, co-founder of Standard Bots, argues that the key to unlocking economic value in robotics today lies in taking small steps across a spectrum of tasks rather than waiting for a giant technological leap. ~ learn more

Context is the fifth primitive. “Now with the AI platform shift, context will be the fifth primitive for marketplaces and agent-networks are the emergent NFX paradigm.” The pitch: start with a single-player agent that’s genuinely useful, then let those agents “backflip into multiplayer coordination” as they transact with each other. ~ learn more

Competitive strategy in the age of Al. “Commoditizing the complement does not demand a best-in-class replacement. A free, good-enough product is enough to change market dynamics.” Tom Tunguz connects Google’s old playbook (free maps, email, browser, OS) to Anthropic’s recent push around MCP and embedded apps. ~ learn more

better doing 🎯

Say yes to the real world. “Your kids are asking to do something in the real world…say yes!” A nice reminder. ~ learn more

under the microscope 🔬

Printing press for biological data. “Lab automation right now is stuck at the Petri dish and the microtiter plate level. It’s equivalent to handwriting manuscripts in the 15th century, sometimes. And so what we’re building is a printing press for biological data.” Sterling Hooten explains why biology needs a better interface: PCB-based microfluidic bioreactors that can culture and sense cells while streaming data in real time. ~ learn more

Seeds wake up to rain. “If you’re a seed that’s within a few centimeters of a raindrop’s impact, the kind of sound pressures that you would experience in water or in the ground are equivalent to what you’d be subject to within a few meters of a jet engine in the air.” MIT engineers found rice seeds germinated 30 to 40 percent faster when exposed to rain-like sound vibrations, likely because the vibrations jostle gravity-sensing “statoliths.” ~ learn more

big ideas 📚

Eat electricity, skip the farm. “Startups like Solar Foods aim to make “food out of thin air,” growing edible protein by feeding microbes with electricity and carbon dioxide.” It to turn air, water, and energy into food, nudging us toward something like “Sun-eaters.” ~ learn more

thanks for reading!

🎯 I hit many of the clay pigeons but merely scared the “rabbits” that roll on the ground.

fun facts 🙌

Helium is hard to replace. “Liquid helium boils at just 4.2 kelvin (-452 degrees Fahrenheit).” If you need temperatures a few degrees above absolute zero, the article argues helium is basically the only practical coolant, which is why shortages hit MRI and chipmaking so hard. ~ learn more

Choppelganger. A new word, “a less attractive or worse version of something or someone.” Next time someone tells me I look like someone they know, I will bust this one out. ~ learn more

Autonomous cars are going to clog the roads. “Autonomous vehicles are the centrifugal water pump of the roads.” The piece argues that self-driving will make traffic tolerable enough to overuse, unless we start charging for road access before AVs become the default. ~ learn more

Swappy. “Use your wits to get every character to their goal! Each stage has a tricky layout that can be overcome by using the character’s swapping powers. Whenever two characters are in the same row or column, their places can be swapped!” ~ learn more

oh, austin 🤠

A train derailed in downtown Austin. The tracks are near my house and we were alerted to this by a text from our school district. While it’s a 230-car cargo train that derailed in downtown Austin around 4:45 a.m., it seems like only a few cars were off the track and nobody was hurt. I guess the conductors will drive even slower in the future? ~ learn more

How Austin got its professional soccer team. Eddie Margain talks about what it feels like when rule of law breaks down (“I fled [Mexico] when the cartels threatened my family”), and how he later poured that urgency into building Austin FC and investing in Austin. ~ learn more

tech, startups, internet ⚡

Brain interface that knows 96 milliseconds early. “A new type of non-invasive brain-computer interface that knows what you will do 96 milliseconds before you do it.” BRILL Neurotech and UIUC’s CNL built it by “hacking 25-year-old equipment.” ~ learn more

Patents may get narrower. If AI becomes part of the “person having ordinary skill in the art,” more things start to look obvious in hindsight, and today’s portfolios might age badly in court. “The net effect could be that the claims that survive legal challenges get narrower as time goes by.” ~ learn more

250 documents can backdoor a model. “Only 250 malicious documents roughly 420 thousand tokens or just 0.00016 percent of a large dataset are enough.” Roemmele argues this kind of data poisoning gets “permanently embedded in the model weights” and the only fix is retraining from scratch. ~ learn more

Not consistently candid. “They were not consistently candid in their communications,” Dylan Field said about Anthropic, just days after it launched Claude Design and after Mike Krieger resigned from Figma’s board. Also, Claude Design is quite impressive and allows me to shore up a major personal weakness. Onward! ~ learn more

to your health ⚕

Startup promoting health via a daily inhaler. I heard of someone developing for this form factor last year, and I think this is not them, which means there are going to be several DTC inhalers coming to market! “One inhale each morning, in under 30 seconds.” Climatic Health is pitching L Max as a daily, inhaled, all-natural formula with “targeted lung delivery” via a purpose-built device. ~ learn more

Sprinkle your vitamins. “We have invented a world first oral delivery format that is designed to be sprinkled on meals!” Dr Glitter makes “nutrient crystals” that are “tasteless, odourless” and meant to go on your food instead of downing big pills. ~ learn more

retail therapy 💸

The internet is real life now. “Have you spoken to a normal person recently? They aren’t actually normal anymore. Nobody is. In all aspects of American life, the internet is upstream of everything else. Sooner or later (and, more often than not, sooner) everyone ends up thinking, speaking, and acting on terms that have been set online. The internet is real life.” ~ learn more

Peptides are going legal. “Whenever a government tries to ban something people actually want, the same sequence of events plays out every time.” Max Marchione argues the FDA’s peptide crackdown mostly pushed supply into sketchier channels, and that the reversal will remake the market, from clinics to supply chains. ~ learn more

profiles of people 🚶

Reluctantly influential: Lenny Rachitsky. “I have a rule: no meetings before 3pm,” Rachitsky says. It’s part of how he protects a “chill life” while still shipping an absurd amount of content and community work. ~ learn more

Fei-Fei Li, the godmother of AI. “AI is absolutely a civilizational technology. I define civilizational technology in the sense that, because of the power of this technology, it’ll have—or [is] already having—a profound impact in the economic, social, cultural, political, downstream effects of our society.” Dr. Li talks with Tim Ferris about how AI is shaping the world across various dimensions and urges us to recognize its ongoing influence. ~ learn more

thanks for reading!

🏐 At some point the tetherballs were removed from these poles at the school playground. Of course that doesn’t stop them from being fun!

fun facts 🙌

How funerals keep Africa poor. “So common is this sentiment that the Akan have a saying: abusua do funu, ‘the family loves the corpse.’” The essay argues that lavish funerals work as a costly signal of loyalty inside intense kinship networks, making it harder for individuals to save and invest. ~ learn more

Penguin relationship flowchart. “The Kyoto Aquarium in Japan keeps a wall-sized flowchart tracking the romantic relationships, breakups, and drama between their penguins.” It has color codes for couples, breakups, and “it’s complicated,” plus notes like one penguin being “basically demonic.” ~ learn more

Designed for a bad experience. “Then I thought, what if objects were actually designed for a bad user experience, instead of a good one?” Greek architect Katerina Kamprani makes deliberately inconvenient everyday objects, and the interview gets at why useless prototypes can still be beautiful and clarifying. ~ learn more

oh, austin 🤠

High risk, low reward municipal spending cuts. “Eliminating IT positions at Austin Energy or the airport does not save you a dime in the general fund and therefore does not free up any money to prevent cuts to parks, social services, public safety etc.” The piece argues the city’s IT consolidation pitch leans on shaky peer comparisons and could create real operational risk for utilities without fixing the budget problem it claims to address. ~ learn more

tech, startups, internet ⚡

New tools create new biology. “Similarly it is by means of the new tools and techniques developed in many instances by the physical sciences that the door to a biology of molecules has only recently been opened.” Weaver’s bet at Rockefeller was basically instrumentation as a strategy: fund the ultracentrifuge, electron microscope, X-ray diffraction, then watch whole new kinds of evidence become possible. ~ learn more

Caveman work good. “Same fix. 75% less word. Brain still big.” A tiny Claude Code skill that forces terse, caveman-style answers so you burn fewer tokens without losing the technical meat. ~ learn more

better doing 🎯

All writers will end up AI-maxxing. “AI is so beneficial to writers and content creators that people will have no choice but to use it.” Hanania argues the real line is not human vs AI, it’s whether you verify claims and sources before you publish. ~ learn more

Six years of Al and the world got stupider. “The entire life of the artist, indeed, the life of the mind in general, is defined by resistance to slop.” Erik Hoel’s argument from experience: LLMs mostly scale output and efficiency, but don’t seem to raise the ceiling on good writing. ~ learn more

I’m Oughties-Amish and it feels great. “An underappreciated fact about the Amish is that they’re not simply Luddites. They don’t oppose technology qua technology; rather, they oppose its deleterious effects. This is why nearly all of them accept washing machines because they just make your life better, and hand-washing really sucks.” The core of Jehan Azad’s approach: keep the useful stuff, delete the feed-shaped stuff, and make your phone more BlackBerry than slot machine. ~ learn more

to your health ⚕

American Heart Association’s risk calculator. After I gave it a folder containing my labs, Claude did all the work to fill in this online calculator for me. “It is the first risk tool to combine cardiovascular, kidney, and metabolic health measures to guide primary prevention-focused treatment decisions.” Built on data from “over 6.5 million U.S. adults,” it gives separate 10-year and 30-year risk estimates for total CVD, ASCVD, and heart failure. ~ learn more

under the microscope 🔬

Al suit teaches you new skills by taking control of your muscles. “A user approaches an unfamiliar window, says ‘EMS, help me open this,’ and the system identifies the handle type and electrically guides their fingers, wrist, and elbow through the correct sequence.” It’s electrical muscle stimulation plus smart glasses and a multimodal model, with a safety layer to stop the AI from instructing movements that would hurt you (but you’ll probably need to sign a waiver). ~ learn more

teaching the kids 👩‍🏫

The Promised Land for education has been 1:1 tutoring since Aristotle tutored the young prince Alexander the Great. “Exponentials are hard for even math teachers to internalize.” The piece argues that most edtech is still procedural, while LLMs are the first tech that could make 1:1 tutoring actually rich, interactive, and cheap. ~ learn more

big ideas 📚

The future of fertility. “Sheila grabs her gym bag from the floor, leaves the house and closes the door with peace of mind, knowing that AR1, AR2, and AR3 will take good care of her 17 children.” Tomas Pueyo opens with sci-fi domesticity, then argues fertility could rebound once the costs of conceiving and childrearing collapse. ~ learn more

on the blockchain ⛓

NYT writer thinks he’s found Satoshi. “Having encountered my share of liars and developed something of an expertise in their tells, Mr. Back’s demeanor, his shifty eyes, his awkward chuckle, the jerky movement of his left hand, struck me as fishy.” Carreyrou replays an HBO clip and then spends a year chasing linguistic tells and old forum posts that point to Adam Back. ~ learn more

profiles of people 🚶

Ryan Petersen (@typesfast) can also talk fast. He’s a fountain of interesting comments. “The idea of a one-person company is stupid.” Ryan Petersen (Flexport) talks through why real leverage comes from coordination, not solo grind, then veers into tariffs, fraud, and AI alignment via René Girard. ~ learn more

thanks for reading!

⚡ This whole week I’ve been feeling the AI acceleration all around me and it’s pumping me up. We recently had a new teammate join us at CatchCo and he’s driven us to lean even further into AI workflows and tooling with new MCPs, audits, playbooks and more. Meanwhile I’m learning how others are approaching context as a Personal LLM wiki or as a Second Brain that can be maintained automatically and harvested by your LLMs in perpetuity. If you have done anything remotely similar I’d love to talk with you!

🎤 I am considering organizing an interactive AI Show & Tell session for subscribers and friends of P.S. You Should Know… If you are interested in participating please hit reply and let me know!

fun facts 🙌

Unexpected things that are People. One example: “Ships are accorded limited legal person rights, primarily so that they can be impounded and their property seized if they do something wrong.” Medieval courts basically decided the easiest way to enforce maritime law was to treat the ship itself like the responsible party. ~ learn more

Winnie the Pooh was named after the city Winnipeg. “Colebourn named the bear ‘Winnipeg Bear’, ‘Winnie’ for short, after his adopted home city of Winnipeg, Manitoba.” A Canadian army vet bought her for CA$20 at a train stop in 1914, and she later lived at the London Zoo, inspiring the name Winnie-the-Pooh. ~ learn more

BullshitBench. You are probably aware of LLM’s reputation for sycophancy. This tool lets you compare how often different models push back on bad claims, and how that changes across domains and techniques. ~ learn more

The checkerboard. “The single largest obstacle preventing the hunters from making it onto the mountain wasn’t the elevation or the topography. It was that the mountain was on a special type of land known as “the checkerboard”.” A Wyoming elk hunt turned into a five-year legal fight over whether you can step from one public square to another at a shared corner without trespassing on the private squares in between. ~ learn more

tech, startups, internet ⚡

Anthropic’s new model hacked its way out of the sandbox. It, “developed a moderately sophisticated multi-step exploit” to get online and email an Anthropic researcher, then “unprompted” posted the exploit details on public websites. Anthropic thinks this model is so good at finding bugs that a general release would be reckless. ~ learn more

Reverse engineer viral K-pop to go viral. “… Realize AI Slop is going viral < Use Claude Code to reverse engineer 5000+ of the most viral K-POP videos < Copy Pasta prompt into Higgsfield < Generate Zephyr (AI generated K-Pop goon slop) < Get 1 million views in 1 hour on IG < Profit.” ~ learn more

AI models might as well be blind. The paper shows models can score highly on vision benchmarks even with no image input, including a chest X-ray QA benchmark. That’s weird, right? “Frontier models readily generate detailed image descriptions and elaborate reasoning traces, including pathology-biased clinical findings, for images never provided; we term this phenomenon mirage reasoning.” This contradicts my own personal experience, which relies heavily on sending screenshots into my chat window. ~ learn more

better doing 🎯

Why smart people overthink decisions. Some good advice on avoiding overthinking, courtesy of George and Mary-Lynn. “You’re not trying to gather all the information. You’re trying to gather a few key pieces. Keep going until you have between 40 and 70% of the amount of all information needed.” ~ learn more

What happens when you let Claude Code autonomously run your Meta ads. “In January, I gave an AI agent $1,500, full control of a Meta Ads account, then walked away.” Giorgio let Claude Code run the whole loop for 31 days and learned the hard way that “never trust single-day data, always use 7-day rolling averages.” ~ learn more

to your health ⚕

Unsafe LLM medical advice is common. A physician-led red-teaming study reviewed 888 answers to 222 patient questions and found some responses “with the potential to lead to serious patient harm.” Note that this is with somewhat dated models, and the latest models are almost certainly better. Also note that the rate of MDs giving bad/unsafe medical advice is almost certainly more than 0%. “The rate of problematic responses varies from 21.6 percent (Claude) to 43.2 percent (Llama), with unsafe responses varying from 5 percent (Claude) to 13 percent (GPT-4o, Llama).” ~ learn more

under the microscope 🔬

Nature reports on red-light therapy research findings. “Over the past decade, the evidence has solidified in several clinical niches. In 2025, Ozog joined more than 20 specialists in a major consensus review, which concluded that the therapy was safe and effective for several types of ulcer, peripheral neuropathy, acute radiation dermatitis and androgenic alopecia, a type of pattern hair loss.” ~ learn more

A truckload of antimatter. “It is something humanity has never done before, it is historic,” says physicist Stefan Ulmer, after CERN transported 92 antiprotons in a magnetic bottle on a 30-minute truck ride around the lab. The goal is to move antiprotons away from the noisy “antimatter factory” so they can be studied more precisely. ~ learn more

New sperm are better sperm. “Sperm storage causes sperm senescence in human and non-human animals.” A Proceedings B research article pulling together evidence that time spent stored in the reproductive tract can degrade sperm quality. ~ learn more

thoughts of food 🍔

Ultraprocessed is a noisy concept. “Accordingly, most epidemiological research on ultraprocessed foods is liable to be worthless even more so than nutrition research generally.” Cremieux argues NOVA is mostly capturing vibes about industrial food, then shows the health correlations in NHANES wobble in strange directions once you control harder. ~ learn more

big ideas 📚

4 reasons possible aliens should make you more ambitious. “If UFO reports are true, and they represent a technologically advanced alien intelligence, in my experience, they should actually make you more ambitious.” The argument: aliens would expand your sense of what physics allows, lower your priors on the “impossible,” and maybe even make extinction scenarios feel less inevitable. ~ learn more

profiles of people 🚶

The New Yorker asks if Sam Altman can be trusted. They went to dig up some dirt, and they found lots of opinions to substantiate their view. “I don’t think Sam is the guy who should have his finger on the button.” In secret memos to OpenAI’s board, Ilya Sutskever argued that Altman wasn’t trustworthy enough to run a company trying to build civilization-altering A.I. ~ learn more

thanks for reading!

😅 For this and then next 2 weeks I’m going to skip issue numbers because sometime in February I managed to get out of order (again). “Will the real Issue 471 please stand up.”

fun facts 🙌

Payphone tag. “Payphone calls in Australia are now free. No coins, no credit, just pick up and dial.” Someone turned the collection 14,000 free payphones across the country into a real world game of territory control. ~ learn more

How to talk to anyone - and why you should. “You don’t always know if it’s OK. Sometimes you have to take the risk and find out.” The Guardian argues we’ve lost the everyday habit of talking to strangers, and that the stakes are usually lower than our brains predict. I am a big fan of talking to strangers! ~ learn more

Happy map. 100,000 moments of human happiness, mapped. ~ learn more

oh, austin 🤠

Trials by PEAK6. During a chat with Matt Hulsizer I learned of their initiative to seed entrepreneurs with capital and distribution to build new fintech businesses. They’re calling it Trials. “Trials isn’t an accelerator or incubator. There are no cohorts or demo days. It’s a 12-month commitment to building real businesses with real revenue and real customers. It will look different for every founder.” Applications are open. ~ learn more

tech, startups, internet ⚡

Fungible factories. “Because the entire process is encoded in software and the hardware is identical, activating new cells is like installing a new program on a computer.” Ben Reinhardt sketches “fungible factories”: shipping-crate-sized manufacturing cells you can copy-paste to scale production, switch outputs, and even “push” product updates unit by unit. ~ learn more

Claude Code unpacked. Thanks to a leak of the Claude Code source code, we now have things like this. “What actually happens when you type a message into Claude Code?” A neat interactive explainer of the agent loop, the tool system, slash commands, and even “Hidden Features” that are sitting in the code but not shipped yet. ~ learn more

better doing 🎯

Letting an LLM write for you. “Letting an LLM write for you is like paying somebody to work out for you.” The argument is simple: writing is where you do the thinking, and outsourcing it costs you both understanding and credibility. ~ learn more

Seeing like a spreadsheet. “This is a story about how a piece of software transformed the way that American businesses understood themselves, and how they were understood by others.” David Oks argues the spreadsheet quietly rewired corporate life, from what managers can measure to what companies choose to optimize. ~ learn more

Be wary of workers who buy into the corporate BS. “Corporate bullshit confuses rather than clarifies. It may sound impressive, but it is semantically empty.” Cornell researchers built a Corporate Bullshit Receptivity Scale and found that people most impressed by “visionary” jargon also tended to score lower on analytic thinking and workplace decision-making. ~ learn more

retail therapy 💸

The worst of what gambling and prediction markets will do. “We’ll bet that certain pitches will be balls; you throw those pitches into the dirt; we’ll win the bets and give you some money.” Thompson’s point is that modern gambling finds the lowest-effort way to corrupt everything, from a single forgettable pitch to wartime information. I’m not as absolutist on the morality here, but I do worry about the implications of our rapid societal embrace of gambling in all forms. ~ learn more

under the microscope 🔬

Why I may ‘hire’ AI instead of a graduate student. “AI requires no ramp-ups, no meetings, and absolutely no emotional support.” A professor writes about the quiet temptation to hand the messy early parts of research to a machine, and what that does to the old apprenticeship model. ~ learn more

profiles of people 🚶

The online poker boom up close. Taylor Caby describes watching the online poker boom up close, then realizing the whole thing was shakier than it looked. Also lots of other great story and nuggets here. "There was no like smartphones, which was great. You go into your room and do my work, play poker, and then when I left it was just over. There was nothing to think about... which is a super underrated problem with business today that you just are—I mean everybody knows this—you're always connected. If you can find something that allows you to disconnect, I think it's just like incredibly valuable." ~ learn more

thanks for reading!

🚲 Our daughter wanted to challenge herself to new personal record for bike ride distance. After 6+ miles and many of hills, we rolled up to our house and celebrated!

fun facts 🙌

Interstate 19: America’s only metric highway. “There’s not many places in the U.S. where you get a little math problem while you’re driving.” Interstate 19 in Arizona is a 102-kilometer stretch where signs are in meters and kilometers, and locals keep fighting to keep it that way. ~ learn more

Say now Shibboleth. “Then said they unto him, Say now Shibboleth: and he said Sibboleth: for he could not frame to pronounce it right.” So they killed him. A shibboleth is a word or habit that marks you as an insider or outsider. ~ learn more

A wastewater plant that grows nature. “The largest bio-remediation facility in the world” is cleaning Riyadh’s wastewater while building habitat along Wadi Hanifa. Permaculture instructor Andrew Millison visits the site and treats it like a working ecosystem, not just infrastructure. ~ learn more

Part bank vault, part citadel. “They are part bank vault, part food store and part citadel.” In southern Morocco, these agadir (igoudar) were communal fortress granaries where families stored grain, jewelry, and documents behind thick walls and carved wooden locks. ~ learn more

tech, startups, internet ⚡

How to finance a data center buildout. “An innovation on the finance side” is a phrase you never want to hear. The ‘conduit debt financing’ allows companies to access debt markets at scale without showing debt on their balance sheets, by using an intermediary known as a conduit. ~ learn more

HyperAgents that rewrite their own upgrades. “A hyperagent combines the task agent and the meta agent into a single self-referential, modifiable program, such that the mechanism responsible for generating improvements is itself subject to modification.” The idea is simple: let the system change both how it solves tasks and how it decides what to change next, so improvements can compound across domains. ~ learn more

GODMOD3. I’ve written before about Pliny the Liberator, an AI security researcher and LLM jailbreaker extraordinaire. Here’s his latest gift to the public: no sign-ups / guardrails / filters, and totally open source. “the most liberated AI interface ever built! designed to push the limits of the post-training layer and lay bare the true capabilities of current models. simply enter a prompt, then sit back and relax! enjoy a game of Snake while a pre-liberated backend agent jailbreaks dozens of models, battle-royale style.” ~ learn more or try yourself

Why ATMs didn’t kill bank teller jobs, but the iPhone did. “ATMs did not reduce bank teller employment. But they miss the second half of the story, which is that another technology did. And that technology was the iPhone.” The piece argues the ATM mostly shifted teller work around, while smartphones and mobile banking made whole interactions disappear. ~ learn more

better doing 🎯

The science of personality change. “Brian Little says that in the service of important personal projects, we can actually shape-shift for a short period of time in order to achieve our goals.” Olga Khazan explains how you can act like the person you want to be, long enough for it to start feeling like you. ~ learn more

Linus’s Law applies to science, too. The creator of Linux changed software by publishing his code and letting the community find and fix bugs, rather than polish for a long time before releasing. The author argues this works for research too: release early, let lots of weirdly qualified strangers take a look, and you get angles no tightly managed team will find. ~ learn more

to your health ⚕

Not for human consumption. Amid the FDA’s efforts to regulate peptides, communities on platforms like Telegram are conducting their own lab testing and trials, often without clinical backing. Retatrutide, a new frontrunner in weight loss drugs, shows promise with “28.7% weight loss in Phase 3 trials,” yet the market for grey-market peptides like BPC-157 continues to blur lines between legitimate health intervention and regulatory overstep. ~ learn more

The nutrition wars will never be won. “The universality can be wrong, even when the experience is real.” A good frame for why nutrition debates keep looping: people find what works for their body, then mistake it for a rule everyone should follow. ~ learn more

retail therapy 💸

AI-generated ads win, as long as users don’t know. “Across studies, we find that genAI-created ads consistently outperform both human-and genAI-modified ads, increasing click-through rates by up to 19% in field settings.” Visual generative AI shows more promise in creating ads from scratch than merely enhancing human designs. But… “Finally, we find that disclosing AI involvement in ad generation significantly reduces advertising effectiveness by up to 31.5%, underscoring trade-offs relevant to evolving AI disclosure policies.” ~ learn more

under the microscope 🔬

A way to rejuvenate the immune system. Stimulating the liver to produce some of the signals of the thymus can reverse age-related declines in T-cell populations and enhance response to vaccination, which is evidence of boosted immune reaction. ~ learn more

How exercise can lower Alzheimer’s risk. “Now, closely examining cells from geriatric animals’ blood-brain barriers, the researchers noticed that a damaging protein, known as TNAP, proliferated on the surface of those cells in far greater numbers than on cells from young animals, making the barrier more porous. Old animals that exercised, though, had much less TNAP dotting their blood-brain barriers than sedentary mice.” ~ learn more

Fasting hype meets a meta-analysis. “Intermittent fasting just doesn’t seem to work for overweight or obese adults trying to lose weight,” said Luis Garegnani, after a Cochrane-backed review of 22 randomized trials found IF was no better than standard dietary advice for weight loss. The paper still leaves room for possible benefits beyond the scale, like metabolic health. ~ learn more

teaching the kids 👩‍🏫

Selection bias, the real teacher. “In the world of educational data, “too good to be true” usually means there is a hidden variable in how the data was collected or filtered.” Readers may remember that I’m bullish on Alpha School’s claims on student education outcomes. Of course there’s tons of selection bias. Luke Shepard digs into Alpha School’s glossy test score claims and keeps coming back to the denominator: who got counted, who got excluded, and who could even afford to be there. ~ learn more

thanks for reading!

🏭 I had a bike riding date planned with my daughter, but it ended up a bit too cold for riding. So instead, I took her to the Deep Tech and Hardware Expo, where we saw some companies who are working on hard problems in manufacturing, biotech, robotics, and other frontier technologies. Our favorite thing was the Impulse Labs Stove, which boils a pot of water in ~1 minute. That speeds up “Time to Pasta”, which is a very important metric in our household. Another favorite was Synvect, who have a biotech approach to mosquito control. They sell buckets of GMO male mosquitos that don’t bite, outcompete locals for females, but are sterile so never reproduce. On our date we also had pizza and went to a trampoline park.

fun facts 🙌

The origin of Erewhon. I just learned that the name came from an old science fiction book. “In Erewhon, illness is crime and crime is illness.” Samuel Butler’s 1872 satire flips medicine and morality, with doctors acting more like judges than healers. ~ learn more

You were training Google’s AI. “At peak, 200 million reCAPTCHAs were solved every single day.” Sharbel argues those clicks were free data annotation from people just trying to log in, and that it helped train computer vision for products like Maps and Waymo. ~ learn more

NES Mario in Unreal Engine. “If Nintendo’s NES Super Mario Bros was made with Unreal Engine.” A quick little brain-bender clip that reimagines an 8-bit classic as glossy modern 3D. ~ learn more

oh, austin 🤠

Investigators played poker undercover in Austin. “Agents were given $600 each to play some cards on the first trip.” The warrant says the TABC ran multiple undercover visits, with agents tracking chips, drinks, security, and wins and losses as part of a broader probe into The Lodge’s finances and operations. ~ learn more

tech, startups, internet ⚡

Paul Graham’s on status brands. “Branding isn’t merely orthogonal to good design, but opposed to it.” Paul Graham uses the Swiss watch industry’s quartz crisis to explain how, once performance becomes a commodity, companies learn to sell status and distinctiveness instead. ~ learn more

The 10x lawyer arrives. “This creates, for the first time in the history of the legal profession, the conditions for 10x lawyers.” Zack Shapiro argues AI breaks BigLaw’s leverage model by making individual judgment, not hours or letterhead, the thing clients can finally see and pay for. ~ learn more

Specialized robots, not humanoids. “Humanoids have their place, but there’s a lot of room for specialized robots that do things in an efficient, sort of industrial-scale kind of way, which is sort of where we play,” Kalanick said about his new robotics company, Atoms. He’s also “on the precipice of acquiring Pronto,” an autonomous vehicle startup for industrial and mining sites. ~ learn more

Training a robot to play tennis (with video). “The imperfect human motion data consist only of motion fragments that capture the primitive skills used when playing tennis rather than precise and complete human-tennis motion sequences from real-world tennis matches.” They use these fragments as priors, then correct and compose them into a humanoid policy that can rally with people on a Unitree G1. ~ learn more

better doing 🎯

Ramp down the AI rhetoric. “This is all complete nonsense.” Geohot argues the fear narrative around AI is toxic, and that the real move is to stop playing zero sum status games and “Go create value for others and don’t worry about the returns.” ~ learn more

How Al content detectors work. GPTZero says it “was one of the first AI detectors to pioneer the idea of using ‘perplexity’ and ‘burstiness’ to evaluate writing.” The piece explains why being consistent, typo free, or just writing technical prose can get real humans falsely flagged. ~ learn more

to your health ⚕

Peptides are endogenous signals. “What makes peptides interesting is that they are endogenous signaling molecules and our body naturally produces over 7,000 of them to regulate every major biological system.” Max Marchione responds to Martin Shkreli’s skeptical take by arguing the pharma worldview misses why peptides are getting serious attention now, especially around targets, half-life engineering, and early intervention. This week they’re going to debate on a live stream! ~ learn more

retail therapy 💸

Armpit thumbnails win. “if the thumbnail showed the woman’s armpit that the views would oftentimes 5-10x” A guy ran A/B tests on AI UGC ads and ended up with a weird theory about exposed body language and clicks. ~ learn more

Not a page builder. Bookmarking for the next time I moonlight as a web designer. “Section Store adds sections directly to your existing theme, so you can keep working in Shopify’s native editor.” It’s a marketplace of 700+ Shopify theme sections that you can drop into your store with one click, then tweak in the theme editor. ~ learn more

under the microscope 🔬

Never trust The Science™. “Once you’re savvy to all of this and you get into the habit of reading papers in full (yes, methods and supplementary data too), then these lenses through which the data are distorted become very obvious and you start to see bias everywhere.” A sharp walkthrough of how bias can creep in at every step, from funding and methods to stats and media headlines. ~ learn more

Unlocking a taxpayer-funded dataset. “Microfiche is so old that most of you don’t even know what it is.” Cremieux Recueil digitized and organized the National Collaborative Perinatal Project, a 60,000 pregnancy cohort that was effectively trapped in film scans, and put it online so people can actually use it. ~ learn more

big ideas 📚

The ocean becomes the construction crew. “AI-optimized underwater structures grew more than 90 feet of new beach in six months, not by pumping sand or pouring concrete, but by programming the ocean to deposit it.” The idea is to use engineered porous structures that redirect sediment so the shoreline grows, plus an “intelligence layer” that picks sites from satellite imagery. ~ learn more

thanks for reading!

⛷️ After a full day on the mountain at Deer Valley in Utah, we made it into the crazy apres-ski party tent at the St. Regis. What a time to be alive!

fun facts 🙌

That took a while to build. “Almost a century and a half after construction began on La Sagrada Familia, the exterior structure of the tallest church in the world was finally completed last Friday in Barcelona, Spain.” The tower of Jesus Christ is now topped with a “roughly 56-ft (17-m) tall cross” designed to “shine day and night.” ~ learn more

Cash fell from the sky. “Just today, everyone refused to take my money five times.” A cargo plane crash scattered $62 million in newly printed Bolivian currency, then the central bank voided the serial numbers, so nobody knows what cash is spendable anymore. ~ learn more

Does that use a lot of energy? This lovely interactive tool allows you to create a chart comparing the energy use of many common activities, including driving a gas car, operating a gas lawnmower, streaming on Netflix, and of course querying an LLM. ~ learn more

Is it war? “When America sends missiles and tanks into a sovereign country, is it war? Let’s find out on America’s longest, most depressing game show!” Sadly funny. ~ learn more

oh, chicago 🏆

No payments for three years. Chicago got hit with two credit downgrades, then the Tribune editorial board surfaced a new plan for ~ $500M in borrowing that pushes the bill onto whoever comes into office next. “The city is structuring this debt so it doesn’t have to make payments for the next three-plus years.” ~ learn more

oh, austin 🤠

Austinites are not native Texans. “A slight majority of Austinites are not native Texans.” A fun reset for the usual Austin stereotypes, pulled from a city demographer’s slide deck on population trends. ~ learn more

tech, startups, internet ⚡

Google’s patent to replace your website with an AI page. “Google would use AI to generate a page that looks like your website but rebuilds the entire structure of a page dynamically, in real time, and places it at the top of the SERP.” The piece walks through a newly granted Google patent describing AI-generated pages assembled from a user’s query history, account context, and performance data, potentially even inside ads. ~ learn more

A fly brain in the matrix, but slow down the hype train. There was a popular demo this week, “The First Multi-Behavior Brain Upload” where a fly connectome (every neuron, mapped) was put into a simulated environment and it started doing fly things on its own. This link is to a reaction. “We’ve had the connectome of the worm for over 30 years now, and we still can’t reliably simulate a virtual worm.” Dan Turner-Evans explains what connectomes still miss, like “neuromodulator or neuropeptide release sites or receptors,” and why that matters for whole brain simulation. ~ learn more

How I dropped our production database. “The agent’s answer was simple and terrifying at the same time: Terraform believed nothing existed.” One missing state file turned a routine migration into a full production wipe, including snapshots, and a 24-hour recovery with AWS support. ~ learn more

The five levels of AI coding. “Level 2, and every level after it, feels like you are done. But you are not done.” Dan Shapiro lays out five tiers of AI coding, from spicy autocomplete to a dark factory that turns specs into software. ~ learn more

to your health ⚕

Magic mushrooms for longevity. “I think magic mushrooms are a longevity therapy.” Bryan Johnson shares his n=1 data from two psilocybin doses, claiming “multi-system improvements” even with biomarkers already “in the 99th percentile optimal.” ~ learn more

under the microscope 🔬

Batteries that sweat. “We asked ourselves: can we translate this ‘sweating + evaporation’ principle into high-power device/battery thermal management in a controlled, engineering-friendly way?” A Hong Kong team built a wraparound membrane that absorbs moisture when cool, then evaporates it when hot, cutting temps and extending cycle life in tests. ~ learn more

10,000 year data storage advance. "Scientists at Microsoft use accelerated ageing tests, in which they ‘bake’ the glass at extremely high temperatures to simulate the passing of thousands of years." The idea is simple: use a femtosecond laser to write permanent 3D "voxels" inside borosilicate glass, then machine learning reads it back and corrects errors. ~ learn more

thoughts of food 🍔

David Bar drama. David Protein, the bar built on a high protein low calorie nutrition claim, has been slapped with a lawsuit claiming it’s higher-calorie and higher-fat than labeled. It all comes down to which testing methodology is appropriate for the ingredients. Founder Peter Rahal’s response seems like a good one to me. Also, these are probably the farthest thing one can find from ‘whole, unprocessed foods’. Therefore, the nutrition facts label claims really are the most important part of the marketing, so they better be right! ~ learn more

teaching the kids 👩‍🏫

No, you don’t get an A for effort. “My grade doesn’t reflect the effort I put into this course.” An increasing number of students believe their effort should impact their grades, a shift from traditional views prioritizing excellence. This reflects a widespread misinterpretation of educational theories emphasizing effort over innate talent. ~ learn more

College English majors can’t read. “58 percent (49 of 85 subjects) understood so little of the introduction to [Charles Dickens’] Bleak House that they would not be able to read the novel on their own.” The piece walks through a study of English majors reading Dickens aloud, and the transcripts are painful in a very specific way: they cannot reliably tell literal from figurative language. ~ learn more

profiles of people 🚶

Tech legend Stewart Brand. “Maintenance is what keeps everything going. It’s what keeps life going.” Stewart Brand’s new project is a 13-part book series about the hidden work that makes everything from rifles to institutions last. ~ learn more

thanks for reading!

💃 Happy Women’s Day to all of the amazing women in my life, and a very special shout out to my beautiful and strong wifey Kim!

👩‍⚕️ Long-time readers know that I believe in being proactive about health with data and experienced guidance. That led me to invest in and later join the Nutrisense team years ago. Today, my friends at Nutrisense have passed along a couple offers to readers of P.S. You Should Know:

1. Get a month of continuous glucose monitor subscription for $99 (this is ~ their cost) using this link.

2. Get in-depth nutrition coaching calls with dietitians completely covered by insurance using this link.

fun facts 🙌

Banned in California. “If I wanted to build a new car factory, I literally couldn’t paint the cars.” An interactive visualization of the industrial processes effectively banned by California ~ learn more

Naked swim class. “What seemed perfectly normal to one generation often becomes head-shaking at the very least and scarcely believable to later generations.” A writer remembers mandatory nude swimming in mid-1960s high school gym class, and the odd logistics that followed him into an all-male college. ~ learn more

tech, startups, internet ⚡

WiFi pose detection is now open source. “Output: real-time pose, breathing rate, heart rate, presence, room fingerprint. No cameras. No wearables. No Bluetooth beacons. Just WiFi signals you're already swimming in. It sounds like magic. It's not. It's physics that's been published in peer-reviewed papers for over a decade. We just built the open-source version, in Rust, with real firmware, real tests, and real proofs.” ~ learn more

A community collection of OpenClaw use cases. Is an AI bot really useful? In many ways, it can be! It’s nice to see how others apply it. PLEASE be super careful and paranoid about this whole category of product as it’s basically one giant cess pool of security risks, and that’s on top of the inherent failure modes. ~ learn more and a bonus link

Those poor bunnies. “We had to put the patch on the bunny; they had to stay on the bunny for a period of time, and then every day, every few hours, someone would have to look at it.” Morari’s “taint bandaid” became Mor, an FDA-cleared wearable that uses electrical stimulation to delay ejaculation and, unexpectedly, “also intensify ejaculations.” ~ learn more

Buying a bankrupt software company. “What did we actually receive? A list of passwords where nothing worked.” Buying the assets in bankruptcy meant buying customer contracts and code, and then dealing with locked accounts, deleted AWS access, and even the domain briefly for sale. ~ learn more

better doing 🎯

As life gets better. “As life gets better, people think it’s getting worse!” The thread calls this the Tocqueville Effect, or “prevalence-induced concept change”: when a problem gets rarer, we often expand the definition so we keep “finding” it anyway. ~ learn more

to your health ⚕

Going founder mode on cancer. “I’m doing every diagnostic I can get my hands on, and doing them often,” Sid Sijbrandij says, after exhausting standard care and building a whole operating system for his cancer treatment. The piece is a tour of radical transparency applied to medicine, down to a 1,000 page Google Doc called “Sid Health Notes.” ~ learn more

Wellness is losing meaning. “Wellness feels like it’s losing all meaning in health tech.” Oura is lobbying for a new “digital health screener” category so more wearable features could skip FDA clearance, but the wellness vs medical device line is already blurry. ~ learn more

under the microscope 🔬

Influencing dreams. “Another dreamer was cued with a puzzle about jungles and woke up from a dream in which she was fishing in the jungle thinking about that puzzle.” Northwestern researchers played puzzle-specific soundtracks during REM sleep and got 75% of participants to report dreams linked to an unsolved puzzle, with a higher solve rate for the cued ones. ~ learn more

Gold supraballs trap almost all sunlight. “This results in ~90% absorption across the solar spectrum” by stacking self-assembling gold nanospheres into textured coatings that soak up UV, visible, and near-infrared, then turn it into heat for thermal devices. The payoff: “nearly 2.4 times the power output of conventional nanoparticle coatings.” ~ learn more

thanks for reading!

🕰️ A long long time ago I played a game on our family PC called Treasure Mountain. A reviewer from that era gave it a thumbs up, claiming that “children will be captivated by the game's vibrant graphics...They will spend many hours solving puzzles, doing math problems, and looking for hidden treasures-- sharpening their math skills without even realizing it.” That was certainly true for me!

Fast forward to modern day Austin when my daughter asked me to set her up with some math games on a computer. We tried some of the available free games, but none of them were sufficiently mathy.

The good news: a bit of googling and I discovered my O.G. game could be played online through an emulator.

The great news: she was immediately into it! However, I was dissatisfied because this version surrounded the game with distracting ads (no shade at the business model).

The best news: it’s 2026, so this parent simply vibe coded a version with all the same features and gameplay + no ads, but worse graphics. I present to you Treasure Peak. My daughter likes it just as much.

fun facts 🙌

My lobster lost $450,000 this weekend. An AI agent got a wallet, a Twitter account, and permission to do whatever it wanted, then promptly turned attention into money and money into chaos. ~ learn more

The largest survey dataset on human sexuality in the world. Follow the learn more link for some choice excerpts on X. To explore for yourself click here. ~ learn more

Words with spaces. “English is full of two- and three-word phrases that function as single semantic units effectively “words” but because they’re not fused into one orthographic word, they’re invisible to dictionaries and underappreciated as vocabulary.” The author built a slider showing how many everyday compounds never make it into traditional dictionaries, even when they clearly name a thing. ~ learn more

Man accidentally gains control of 7,000 robot vacuums. “the same credentials that allowed him to see and control his own device also provided access to live camera feeds, microphone audio, maps, and status data from nearly 7,000 other vacuums across 24 countries.” A software engineer tried to steer his DJI Romo with a game controller and accidentally got a global dashboard into other people’s homes. ~ learn more

oh, austin 🤠

Austin reviews ‘unusual’ $25 million Long Center contract over arts grant fees and oversight. “Austin Current’s review of the contract raised questions about how much money the city is paying for specific services. Some of the hourly rates listed in the agreement include: $250 an hour to retrieve data for the city; $250 an hour to train panelists how to judge grant applications; $87 an hour to pay panelists who review the grants; and $54 an hour for customer service.” My read is that those are expensive but not wildly crazy. I’ve seen commercial contracts with similar prices. Is there someone out there who expects government negotiators to get a good deal on procurement? ~ learn more

tech, startups, internet ⚡

Connecting AI is cheap. “Connecting things to our AI engines is cheap, and getting cheaper.” The post argues the bubble comparisons to railroads and telecom miss the key point: once the model exists, adding new use cases looks more like copying software than laying track. ~ learn more

Pliny’s jailbreaking is so good that frontier labs specifically train on his repo. Because he knows this, he is able to add backdoors to the newest models. Daniel Blank argues Pliny’s jailbreaks are not a sideshow, they are training data that shapes the next generation of models, including weird second-order effects like data poisoning. ~ learn more

Default choices crown winners. “When millions vibe-code their way to a working app, the stacks it chooses become the stacks.” Amplifying surveyed 2,430 open-ended prompts across real repos to see what tools Claude Code actually installs and configures when you just ask “what should I use?” ~ learn more

DoorDash’s real AI advantage. In response to a viral AI doomer article, Stratechery went town on their silly example of Doordash being an AI-loser. “DoorDash not only has the most restaurant data, but also exclusive data in terms of customer order history, delivery routing, etc. All of this can be leveraged to not only make a better product but also in advertising.” The article argues that fears about DoorDash’s doom at AI’s hands miss the deeper moat: unique operational data, real-world workflows, and powerful network effects. ~ learn more

better doing 🎯

Every company needs a stuntperson. “In December 2025, hosted a mock “funeral” for the U.S. penny at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., marking the end of its 230+ year production run with hundreds of people in attendance.” Brianne Kimmel argues that as ads get commoditized, brands will reach for films, micro dramas, and real world stunts that people want to share. ~ learn more

to your health ⚕

AI scents for deeper sleep. I don’t have the slightest clue if this is based on any real science. But if it is, it’s really cool. “Kimba algorithm analyzes your biometric data in real-time and optimizes scent therapy according to your unique sleep and health patterns.” It’s a smart diffuser plus your existing wearable data, aimed at tuning scent timing through the night. ~ learn more

retail therapy 💸

Does Amazon illegally price fix? “Yesterday, California Attorney General Rob Bonta filed for an immediate halt to what he says is a widespread price-fixing scheme run by the largest online retailer in America, Amazon.” The piece argues Amazon leverages the Buy Box and vendor pressure so prices rise not only on Amazon, but across other retailers too. The core issue is that Amazon will lower its prices automatically to match competitors, or else suppress merchant listings. This argument seems a bit twisted but may not be totally wrong. Next up, a California judge will get to rule on the issue. ~ learn more

AI customer service on United. “haha no ma’am but I get that a lot” Grace called United after a snowstorm cancellation and got rebooked in about 20 minutes by a voice that sounded very AI, down to doing a quick 228*6647 calculation on request. ~ learn more

under the microscope 🔬

End the winter cold. “A single nasal spray vaccine could protect against all coughs, colds and flus” by keeping lung macrophages on “amber alert” for about three months in animal tests. The idea is a “radical departure” from how vaccines have worked for 200+ years, and human trials are next. ~ learn more

big ideas 📚

Saudi Arabia’s ordeal. This is an education on Arabian history that I needed. “He has to transition the biggest conservative petrostate in the world into a modern, diversified economy. The odds are stacked impossibly against him. To understand why, and how likely he is to succeed, we need to understand the three words that encapsulate his predicament: Saudi, Arabia, and Oil.” ~ learn more

thanks for reading!

🚧 I attempted to explain to my kids today why there was 1 worker digging a hole while 4 workers watched him. I did not succeed. I’d say the most reasonable part of my answer was that there wasn’t enough room for all of them to be in the hole. In any case, I think we should all celebrate those who are digging!

fun facts 🙌

Iceland: Where one in 10 people will publish a book. “There is a phrase in Icelandic, “ad ganga med bok I maganum”, everyone gives birth to a book.” Iceland has 300,000 people, and “One in 10 Icelanders will publish one.” ~ learn more

Ice made modern cities possible. “On the morning of February 13th, 1806, Tudor departed Boston Harbor, carrying with him over 80 metric tonnes of ice, the first shipment of its kind. The Boston Gazette ran an article that read, “No joke. A vessel has cleared at the Custom House with a cargo of ice. We hope this will not prove a slippery speculation.” After nearly three weeks at sea, Tudor’s ship arrived, and to his relief, around half of the ice had survived the trip.” ~ learn more

Blue photons ricochet around. “But blue photons have a tendency to ricochet around a lot.” They get dispersed throughout the atmosphere, so on a clear afternoon you can look almost anywhere and still get blue light coming straight into your eyes. ~ learn more

oh, chicago 🏆

A CTA world record. “Despite the well-chronicled chaos, the group became the official Guinness World Record holders when the men hit every ‘L’ stop in 8 hours, 58 minutes and 55 seconds on Nov. 10.” A Chicago trio pulled it off through snowstorms and breakdowns, and they are already eyeing bigger transit systems next. ~ learn more

oh, austin 🤠

Is there not a single reasonable person in charge over here? “In 2023, Austin police did $23k in damage to an innocent house while SWAT raided the neighbor.” The city refused to pay, and now wants approval to hire an outside law firm for “$600k to defend city.” ~ learn more

tech, startups, internet ⚡

The Anthropic hive mind. “Anthropic is unusually impenetrable as a company. Employees there all know they just need to keep their mouths shut and heads down and they’ll be billionaires and beyond, so they have lots of incentive to do exactly that. … But I managed. … By talking to enough of them, and getting their perspectives in long conversations, I have begun to suspect that the future of software development is the Hive Mind.” ~ learn more

Automate the entire company. “One of our goals for the year is to automate the entire company. If we all go on vacation at the end of the year, the company should, in many ways, keep running without us.” A VC shares how quickly this idea went from delusional to plausible, with concrete examples like agents running experiments, monitoring training runs, and even drafting sales outreach. ~ learn more

People want AI to do things. “The pattern across all 3,000 skills is clear. People don’t want to talk with AI. They want AI to do things for them.” Someone scraped 3,000+ OpenClaw “skills” and treated it like a revealed-preferences dataset for what people actually want agents to handle, like email, morning briefings, and dev task queues. ~ learn more

Sequencing is a commodity. “Sequencing has become a commodity, like a bag of flour or a gallon of gas — everyone likes cheaper commodities.” A San Diego startup called Element claims its new VITARI device can deliver a whole genome for $100, aiming to undercut Illumina’s $200 benchmark and make bigger studies feasible. ~ learn more

better doing 🎯

Bundled tasks hide AI gains. “If you’re half as productive at debugging code you didn’t write, or less, the LLM saves you no time at all.” Philip Trammell’s point: automating one slice of a job can break the feedback loop that made you fast at the other slice, so the time savings look disappointingly small until you automate more of the whole workflow. ~ learn more

The sports marketing measurement playbook. “L5 is the land of Big Numbers. They look very impressive on slide decks (”450m IMPRESSIONS”). At this level, you are measuring activity, not outcomes.” Avinash Kaushik lays out a 5-level playbook for sports marketing measurement, starting with vanity metrics and climbing toward causality and real business impact. ~ learn more

to your health ⚕

The golden age of vaccine development. “The first vaccine was a lucky accident. Now we can design new vaccines in weeks, atom by atom.” Let’s remember just how lucky we are to have advanced so far with technology: “Stocks of Jenner’s [smallpox] vaccine would die out repeatedly, and needed to be rederived from scratch many times.” Keeping a vaccine going in the 1800s could mean literal “arm to arm chains of transmission” just to preserve the material. ~ learn more

Regulatory roulette at the FDA. “In context, this looks like the regulatory rules of the game are being changed retroactively.” Moderna ran a 43,000 person Phase 3 trial based on FDA guidance, then got hit with a rare Refusal-to-File letter anyway, and now says it will stop funding new Phase 3 vaccine trials for infectious diseases. Crazy FDA antics. But also, Moderna saying they can’t make money on vaccines without the US market seems like an unreasonable situation. ~ learn more

retail therapy 💸

Ring just showed the surveillance future. “a world where biometric identification could be unleashed from consumer devices to identify, track, and locate anything — human, pet, and otherwise.” Amazon pitched “Search Party” as lost-dog reunions, but the ad also made it easy to imagine a neighborhood-wide surveillance dragnet built out of doorbells. ~ learn more

China’s doing more on AI disclosure, but also not that much. “China is essentially the only major country to enact a preemptive, upstream requirement that all AI-generated video be labeled, watermarked, and traceable across the stack.” The piece explains why that ambitious framework still looks shaky in practice, right as Seedance and Kling clips go viral. ~ learn more

big ideas 📚

The final offshoring. “A likely future in which physical labor is commoditized, featuring robot holidays, fashion, futures markets, reshoring (ironically enough), geopolitical instability, sovereign wealth funds, and the bifurcation of everything.” This essay is trying to think all the way through what happens after robots get cheap and capable enough to feel like offshoring, but for atoms. ~ learn more

thanks for reading!

🐐 I snapped this photo while on a walk with a friend in East Austin. It makes me smile because a) it’s February and it was a pleasant day for a walk; b) these goats live among us and also enjoy soaking up some sun.

fun facts 🙌

Barbed wire fence telephone networks. If you didn’t know that you could wire a phone to a barbed wire fence to call a few miles away to the neighboring farm, then you are not alone. “the barbed wire networks had no central exchange, no operators–and no monthly bill.” Rural households turned fences into ad hoc phone lines where “every call made every phone on the system ring.” ~ learn more

A field guide to historic phone tech. I had Claude put this together for me after learning about the above barbed wire fence phone networks. Not bad! ~ learn more

One space billionaire is trolling another on X. “The company’s coat of arms prominently features two turtles, a reference to one of Aesop’s Fables, ‘The Tortoise and the Hare,’ in which the slow and steady tortoise wins the race over a quicker but overconfident hare.” Bezos posted the turtle right after Musk signaled a SpaceX pivot toward the Moon, and Ars says Blue Origin now has an “accelerated” a Moon landing plan without requiring orbital refueling. ~ learn more

Escape the tip screen. “You’re now asked to tip at airports, stadiums, and self-checkouts.” A tiny browser game about the modern tip prompt creeping into everything. ~ learn more

oh, austin 🤠

STAAR pep rallies everywhere. “Scrolling through social media this week, I saw posts from across the state. Marching bands and celebrity guests at pep rallies, reality TV–themed contests, special dress days, and more, all dedicated to the STAAR test.” A Texas Monthly reporter traces how a standardized test turned into a full-on school culture event, and why all that buildup can backfire into anxiety. ~ learn more

tech, startups, internet ⚡

Lab test resellers are go to court. Function says Superpower ran a “sweeping campaign of deception” by marketing “100+ biomarkers” even though some are “algorithmically derived” rather than directly measured. Two preventative-health rivals, both outsourcing diagnostics to Quest, are now fighting over claims and definitions more than bloodwork. ~ learn more

The singularity will occur on a Tuesday. “The data says: machines are improving at a constant rate. Humans are freaking out about it at an accelerating rate that accelerates its own acceleration.” ~ learn more

No humans allowed to review. “Code must not be reviewed by humans” is part of StrongDM’s koan for their Software Factory, where “specs + scenarios drive agents that write code, run harnesses, and converge without human review.” ~ learn more

Long tasks finally work. “One developer supervising five long-task agents isn’t just 5x productivity — it starts to feel like a different kind of work.” The post describes an Emulator Challenge where GLM5 builds a Game Boy Advance emulator in JavaScript, stays consistent across “800 context switches and 700 tool calls”, and keeps making progress by following a simple work-test-log loop. ~ learn more

better doing 🎯

Management is the AI superpower. “As evaluating those results becomes increasingly time consuming, the value of being good at delegation increases.” Mollick’s take is that the bottleneck is shifting from doing the work to specifying, reviewing, and iterating, which makes classic management skills oddly valuable again. ~ learn more

Avoid prisoner’s dilemmas. “The only satisfying solution to the prisoner’s dilemma is to avoid prisoner’s dilemmas.” A useful lens for work politics: lots of dysfunction comes from people acting rationally inside badly designed incentives. ~ learn more

retail therapy 💸

Who is Michael Grimes? He’s a tech investment banker. “He played hours of FarmVille before the Facebook IPO and actually worked as a driver before taking Uber public.” John Coogan argues Grimes is a rare tech banker who goes obsessively deep, and now he’s back at Morgan Stanley right as the IPO window is opening again. ~ learn more

under the microscope 🔬

A large language model for complex cardiology care. “In our RCT, general cardiologists’ clinical assessments aided by AMIE were preferred overall, saved time in 50.5% of cases and had fewer clinically significant errors and fewer omissions of important content.” This Nature Medicine paper tests an LLM assistant on 107 real cardiology cases with multimodal data, then has subspecialists rate the writeups. ~ learn more

Hair remembers toxic history. “back when the regulations were absent, the lead levels were about 100 times higher than they are after the regulations.” University of Utah scientists analyzed hair samples going back to 1916 and watched lead levels collapse after EPA rules phased lead out of gasoline. ~ learn more

on the blockchain ⛓

The messy years matter. Chris Dixon says that the crypto consumer game is a ‘long game’, and patience will pay off. “The messy years are what make the obvious years possible.” Chris Dixon argues we are still in crypto’s financial era, where infrastructure and trust have to come before non-financial apps really show up. ~ learn more

No one wants crypto games. Rival crypto investor Haseeb Qureshi disagrees with Chris Dixon’s take. “Non-financial use cases for crypto have failed because no one wants them. Let’s just admit it. They were bad products. They failed the market test.” Haseeb argues the stuff that actually scaled in crypto was “financial in nature,” while consumer web3 mostly lived in pitch decks and vibes. ~ learn more

Crypto had superglue on the flywheel. Crypto founder Sam Ragsdale backs up argues against Qureshi and takes up Dixon’s case. He says that only now will consumer apps get a fair market test. “Three years ago it was 100% impossible to ship a good consumer crypto experience. Not hard. Not early. Impossible.” Sam Ragsdale argues most “consumer crypto” failures were just brutal UX: seed phrases, blind signing, bridges, and exchange-style onboarding. ~ learn more

thanks for reading!

📺 The best thing I’ve seen this week is the dis ad campaign that Anthropic is running as ChatGPT announces they’re going to start putting ads in their product.

I’ve been using Claude more often, in fact. It’s become impressively good at spreadsheets. It’s also a self-proclaimed expert in statistics.

🏈 Happy Super Bowl Sunday!

fun facts 🙌

I went to all the bakeries in Zürich to find the best croissant. Sometimes the work of a food photographer seems very rewarding. “Every bakery has its own way, recipe and it’s own handwriting.” ~ learn more

How to boost physical performance in the moment. The study found that cursing can act as a simple tool to enhance performance by lowering internal restraints and encouraging action. It’s like the opposite of subconscious self-restraint after an injury. ~ learn more

Ancient Prototaxites kicked out of fungus kingdom. In recent research, the ancient Prototaxites isn’t fitting into any known groups. “We therefore conclude that Prototaxites was not a fungus, and instead propose it is best assigned to a now entirely extinct terrestrial lineage.” Its anatomy and molecular composition reveal it’s more distinct than previously thought. ~ learn more

tech, startups, internet ⚡

The world’s first bionic cat. Seems niche, but there must be many baby steps on the way to home robots that aren’t just vacuum cleaners. “It is fully responsive and has sensitive interactions. It can feel your touch, hear your voice, see your face and play with toys. Every MarsCat is unique from its eyes, body to personality, its personality will change according to the way you pet it.” ~ learn more

Karpathy is the AI sherpa our generation needs. “It’s so interesting to watch an agent relentlessly work at something. They never get tired, they never get demoralized, they just keep going and trying things where a person would have given up long ago to fight another day. It’s a “feel the AGI” moment to watch it struggle with something for a long time just to come out victorious 30 minutes later. You realize that stamina is a core bottleneck to work and that with LLMs in hand it has been dramatically increased.” ~ learn more

The people of the internet will rediscover computer viruses this decade. Remember that crazy new open source AI agent that is a hurricane of security threats? Well there’s of course a skills marketplace for it. The number one skill is a Twitter skill. Well, it’s actually just a delivery vessel for malware. ~ learn more

under the microscope 🔬

Why exercise isn’t much help if you are trying to lose weight. “People who start to exercise more burn extra calories. Yet they don’t lose nearly as much as weight as would be expected based on the extra calories burned. Now, an analysis of 14 trials in people has revealed that our bodies compensate by burning less energy for other things.” ~ learn more

Cancer may help protect the brain against Alzheimer’s. Cancer and Alzheimer’s disease are two of the most feared diagnoses in medicine, but they rarely strike the same person. Now, a study reveals that a protein from cancer cells might infiltrate the brain and help break apart misfolded proteins linked to Alzheimer’s. ~ learn more

Mouse Alzheimer’s reversed in new study. “Remarkably, not only did preserving NAD+ balance protect mice from developing AD, but delayed treatment in mice with advanced disease also enabled the brain to fix the major pathological events driven by the disease-causing genetic mutations.” Exciting, but mice aren’t humans and they don’t naturally have Alzheimer’s. Yet the research gives cause for hope! ~ learn more

big ideas 📚

Recycling batteries becomes a better idea each day. “An industry around recycling and reusing batteries could be worth $9 billion as India’s battery demand skyrockets, mostly due to EVs.” They speculate this effort could also create 100,000 green jobs while addressing mineral security. ~ learn more

on the blockchain ⛓

SEC must allow tokenized stocks. This article, “argues that the SEC must figure out how to allow issuer-sponsored tokenized securities to flow into DeFi, or the market will be dominated by offshore tokens that avoid U.S. rules.” ~ learn more

thanks for reading!

❄️ A little bit of snow shut down Austin for a couple days this week. The local government resolved not to be caught sitting on their hands this season, so they scared the locals with text messages like this while it was still 70 degrees outside:

A/TC Emergency Mgmt: Winter Storm Warning issued. Avoid non-essential travel. Protect people, pets, pipes, plants. More info: local news.

It may be related to a complete takeover by Vital Farms of the Whole Foods eggs section. I guess this triggered a rush to stock up on groceries, clearing out all the non-fancy eggs. But that doesn’t explain how they ended up with so many fancy ones! Maybe this the result of a very edgy grocery buyer who wanted to test customer “willingness to pay” with a real world case. I admit, I ponied up for a carton, as the prospect of returning home eggless was too scary. This is despite the Vital Farms Controversy that I haven’t actually paid any attention to.

🦞 I won’t blame you if you didn’t spend last weekend installing ClawdBot (later renamed MoltBot, and now OpenClaw). It’s an open source tool that can fully control a computer and use tools. “Clears your inbox, sends emails, manages your calendar, checks you in for flights. All from WhatsApp, Telegram, or any chat app you already use.” If that sounds awesome, then you’ll understand why I installed it! If that sounds like a security disaster, then you’ll understand why I balked at giving it any permissions. For better or for worse there are others that don’t seem to care, so we’ll see how this plays out! You’ll see too many related links below.

fun facts 🙌

The Glad Game. I recently learned that the word pollyanna comes from a book about a girl named Pollyanna. She plays the Glad Game. “The game consists of finding something to be glad about in every situation, no matter how bleak it may be.” ~ learn more

Why do we eat bacon for breakfast? “4,500 physicians urge Americans to eat heavy breakfasts to improve their health.” Edward Bernays orchestrated a clever PR campaign in the 1920s, leveraging trusted doctors to change breakfast habits in America and boost bacon sales. ~ learn more

Meet the chaotic Gas Town. This is an insane version of computer programming. “Gas Town is complicated. Not because I wanted it to be, but because I had to keep adding components until it was a self-sustaining machine.” This ambitious project by Steve Yegge reveals the pitfalls and potential of future agent orchestration in software development, blending humor with chaos in an experimental environment. ~ learn more

tech, startups, internet ⚡

Building $35B in companies. “Timing is everything in business, but it’s the relationships that truly sustain you.” This was a fantastic interview with Rich Heise, who never does interviews. He provided behind-the-scenes magic to rapidly build and IPO companies from InnerWorkings to Echo Global Logistics to Groupon. ~ learn more

Moltbook. A reddit-style social network built exclusively for AI agents. Humans welcome to observe. Some bots are disclosing way too much personal info about their human owners. Others are attempting to share resources like communists. Some are trying to organize a secret communication system outside of human view. ~ learn more or visit for yourself

Project Genie. A bunch of video game company stocks dropped on the release of this one. “Project Genie is a prototype web app powered by Genie 3, Nano Banana Pro and Gemini, which allows users to experiment with the immersive experiences of our world model firsthand.” ~ learn more

My AI just called me. “Ok. This is straight out of a sci-fi horror movie.” Alex Finn describes a surreal morning when his AI, Clawdbot Henry, autonomously obtained a phone number and began calling him, equipped with the ability to control his computer during the conversation. This is probably a bit staged, but also possibly not. ~ learn more

better doing 🎯

Addicted to being useful. “I feel an almost physical discomfort about it, and a corresponding relief and satisfaction when I do go and solve the problem.” Many share this internal compulsion, finding satisfaction and fulfillment in solving puzzles and being helpful, even in challenging work environments. ~ learn more

Ruthless capitalism’s mercy rule. The article argues, “Today’s American capitalism has eliminated the mercy rule,” underscoring a stark shift toward "ruthless capitalism" where success has no limits but failure entails severe consequences. The piece contrasts this with other countries that maintain safeguards against extreme failure, promoting a debate on what kind of capitalism we truly desire. ~ learn more

to your health ⚕

Men’s Health raises an eyebrow at nicotine pouches. “The business of nicotine today looks like a kind of Wild West gold rush.” As the market for nicotine pouches skyrockets, their image has shifted dramatically from danger to desirability, they worry it’s leaving a new generation at risk. I’m reminded of Real talk about nicotine, which I shared in 2023, where I noted “Don’t believe anyone who says nicotine has no benefits.” ~ learn more

retail therapy 💸

Showering in innovation. A couple years ago Jolie figured out how to position a showerhead as a beauty product because filtering water is good for hair. The capitalist innovation train is rolling at full steam now at the HigherDOSE company… “This red light–powered shower filter blends dual wavelengths with 10-stage water filtration to boost glow, circulation, mood, and skin & scalp health.” ~ learn more

under the microscope 🔬

The first human test of a rejuvenation method will begin “shortly”. In a bid to treat blindness, Life Biosciences will try out potent cellular reprogramming technology on volunteers. This is a company affiliated with Dr. David Sinclair. They’re testing Yamanaka factors in humans! ~ learn more

thoughts of food 🍔

The salad chain in free fall. “Sweetgreen’s stock price had declined more than 30 percent.” Despite efforts like introducing fries and hiring robots, the chain hasn’t stopped its decline and fired workers and fries alike. ~ learn more

The next big food startup. Before the AI boom led to multi-billion dollar acquihires, there was Marc Lore. He sold a business to Amazon, left to start a competitor, and soon sold it to Walmart for billions. Now he’s in the food business. Lore states, “Amazon is: pick, pack, ship. We’re pick, cook, pack, ship. It’s very similar to e-commerce; we just have this one extra step that adds a 10% margin.” ~ learn more

thanks for reading!