🔥 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!

🥶 Good luck to everyone in the path of the winter weather this weekend!

fun facts 🙌

QuickQuack. Scroll Wikipedia like TikTok. ~ learn more

Famous trees. “The following is a list of individual trees regarded as important or specific by their historical, national, locational, natural or mythological context.” ~ learn more

What is the Millennial Pause? “People have also noted that, once they have been made aware that their recordings include millennial pauses, they find their own habit embarrassing, yet still have trouble breaking the habit.” ~ learn more

tech, startups, internet ⚡

Running a coding agent for weeks. Here comes the future: “Hundreds of agents can work together on a single codebase for weeks, making real progress on ambitious projects.” The team at Cursor are doing crazy things. Coordinating hundreds of agents for long-term projects has yielded significant results, from developing a web browser to improving product features. “The system isn’t perfectly efficient, but it’s far more effective than we expected.” ~ learn more

Cybertruck’s uphill battle. “Tesla confirmed Cybertruck sales were down to ~5,000 units” in Q2 2025, and despite aggressive efforts to revive interest, it hasn’t turned the tides. Ford’s F-150 Lightning outsold the Cybertruck before its production was halted, hinting at challenging times ahead for Tesla’s ambitious truck. But I guess none of this matters because the future is all about the robotaxis!~ learn more

Who will pay for robots? “The key to winning is figuring this out in advance.” As robotics technology accelerates, the financial viability of deploying these robots remains uncertain. This article explores the important business models needed to align costs with evolving capabilities. ~ learn more

LLM problems observed in humans. As LLMs improve, some argue that “the bar for the [Turing] test gets raised and eventually humans won’t pass the test themselves.” The article highlights how traits like small context windows and persistent hallucinations are no longer just problems for AI but increasingly for us too. ~ learn more

better doing 🎯

Neighbors shape your future. I once came to a career day at a high school in West Garfield Park, Chicago. It’s a rough neighborhood. That day I learned the career aspirations of those kids were clustered and different from those I grew up exposed to. That day I learned the phrase you have to see it to be it. Now comes this bit of economic research: “Living next door to someone as a child increases the probability of having the same occupation as them 30 years later by about 10 percent.” ~ learn more

Just get a better job. “In this economy, you don’t just ‘get another job.’ You meticulously choose, and then fully commit to, the one job that will consume your next chapter.” This is an interesting point of view, and I’d say that the nuance is circumstantial. The “in this economy” premise implies we’re all living in the same economy, but practically that’s not the case. ~ learn more

Think before you type. “The pattern is consistent: thinking first, then typing, produces dramatically better results than typing first and hoping Claude figures it out.” Many users struggle to make the most out of AI tools like Claude Code because they jump straight into typing. Taking the time to plan can significantly improve your output quality. ~ learn more

to your health ⚕

Stop calling them vaccines. “If the CDC were being honest, they should tell everyone up front that it’s not a vaccine at all.” BJ Campbell argues that the terminology we use around vaccines has become muddled, especially in light of the flu and COVID-19 shots which do not meet traditional efficacy standards. A thought-provoking examination of trust in public health institutions. ~ learn more

I think the NYT just thinks people are too dumb for health data. This is their coverage of Function Health, which provides access to tons of lab tests direct-to-consumer. There’s a recurring pattern I’ve noticed in NYT coverage of health products that empower consumers. “The start-up Function will send practically anyone to a lab for extensive medical testing, no physical required. Is that a good thing?” ~ learn more

retail therapy 💸

Postal arbitrage is a thing now. "Why send a postcard when you can send actual stuff?" In a quirky twist, you can order Amazon Prime items like cans and pasta for less than sending a letter, complete with a free gift note. ~ learn more

Caught off guard by the cost of a postage stamp. The link above opened my eyes, and I learned that stamps now cost $0.78. I had to google it to check, and last year was “the 19th stamp rate change since 2000 and the fifth hike in two years.” Since that was written, there has been further stampflation. Maybe banking ‘forever stamps’ can be a good investment now? ~ learn more

Judge denies Amazon’s effort to block Saks Global bankruptcy. In 2024 Amazon invested $475 million in preferred equity to help Saks buy luxury brand Neiman Marcus for $2.65 billion. They expected the premium real estate would provide some collateral. About 18 months later, here comes bankruptcy to wipe out that investment. ~ learn more

under the microscope 🔬

Exercise vs. therapy for depression “Our findings suggest that exercise appears to be a safe and accessible option for helping to manage symptoms of depression.” Also interesting: “The review found that light to moderate intensity activity may be more helpful than vigorous workouts.” ~ learn more

Why do clothes shrink? “Whenever they’re exposed to heat, moisture or mechanical action, they tend to relax and return to their original crinkled state.” Understanding the science behind textile fibres can help prevent shrinkage and even rescue your favorite garments. ~ learn more

New era for brain-computer interfaces. “The skin placement and extremely small size of this new wireless brain interface could offer a variety of benefits over traditional gel or dry electrodes.” Georgia Tech’s breakthrough in wearable BCIs might enable everyday integration by placing microneedle sensors seamlessly between hair follicles. ~ learn more

profiles of people 🚶

a16z: The Power Brokers. “We have all the models—we’re elephant hunting, going after big game!” This confident proclamation from Marc Andreessen encapsulates a16z’s strategy as they announce a whopping $15 billion in fresh funds, aiming to dominate venture capital like never before. Packy McCormick provides the laudatory coverage of the firm herein. ~ learn more

Meet ski map artist James Niehues. “Many skiers come up to me and we get talking and it comes out that I’m the trail map artist, and they all say, ‘Oh my gosh, I thought that was done by computers!’ And I say, ‘No, I paint all of those trees’.” For over 30 years, James Niehues has been crafting hand-painted ski maps, capturing the subtle details and unique characteristics of ski resorts worldwide. ~ learn more

thanks for reading!

🎒 I’m quite impressed by our product designers at MTB. The Fish Slaps Backpack is available now for the little (or big) fishing enthusiast in your life.

fun facts 🙌

Kids yell “poop” at Alexa and these musicians profit. Are you familiar with the song Poopy Stupid Butt? “For a while, the couple was making around $100 a month from the song - and then COVID hit. Kids were stuck at home with little to do, and frazzled parents became more willing than usual to let their kids be entertained by an electronic device. The streams on Amazon for “Poopy Stupid Butt” skyrocketed: It’s now been streamed about 10 million times on Amazon Music and has generated about $10,000 in total income for Helpish and Muir.” ~ learn more

Only in Alaska. It’s perfectly legal for bush planes (Wikipedia link) to use roads as runways, but seeing one “gas up at the local station” might still catch you off guard. ~ learn more

An ASCIl art playground. In the early days of my internet journey, I discovered that people could make impressive things with the font characters that I regularly overlooked. "This playground is an attempt of a browser-based live-code environment with text-only output. It is born from the joy and pleasure ASCII, ANSI and in general text-based art can give and it is an homage to all the artists, poets and designers which used and use text as their medium." ~ learn more

The Chad mindset. “Mr Peters is a ‘looks-maxing’ influencer.” This community of young men chases an ideal male physique, using extreme methods like "bonesmashing" to enhance facial structure and even resorting to crystal meth to maintain a certain weight. ~ learn more

oh, chicago 🏆

Why you can’t start a Chicago-style hot dog cart in Chicago. “But in the home of Chicago-style hot dogs, there is not a single food-cart vendor licensed to sell hot dogs on a city sidewalk, according to a Chicago Policy Center review of city data. No matter one’s culinary talent or work ethic, city regulations make hot dogs—and other street-food staples—effectively illegal to sell from a cart.” ~ learn more

Federal government gets a refund from CPS after grant fraud uncovered. “Chicago Public Schools had to pay back nearly $1.2 million to the U.S. Department of Education after an employee repeatedly falsified data on federal grant applications over the course of multiple years.” ~ learn more

oh, austin 🤠

Austin ISD’s $100 million oversight. Amid financial pressures, Austin ISD planned to improve many schools with a $2.4 billion bond. Yet, a surprising decision followed: “By that point, more than $95 million in bond money already had been spent or committed to campuses headed for closure,” leaving taxpayers questioning the investment’s effectiveness. It’s not crazy for there to be some waste when the future is unpredictable and investments take time. Yet, I am unimpressed by the district leadership so I won’t hesitate to point out their shortcomings! ~ learn more

tech, startups, internet ⚡

Open APIs are over. “Salesforce, Datadog & Epic are building walls. After two decades of flourishing through open APIs & data portability, the software industry’s largest incumbents are locking down.” As AI accelerates development, companies are protecting their ecosystems fiercely, signaling the end of an open era. ~ learn more

One industry that’s being replaced by AI: proxy advisors. “[JPMorgan] will use the [internal artificial-intelligence-powered] platform to manage the votes and the AI also will analyze data from more than 3,000 annual company meetings and provide recommendations to the portfolio managers, the memo said, replacing the typical roles of proxy advisers.” ~ learn more

Fitness app Ladder’s rise to #1. This was a really cool interview, and a fantastic entrepreneurial story. From near-bankruptcy to success: “We pivoted from a failing marketplace to an engineering-first fitness platform.” Discover how they cracked TikTok’s algorithm and scaled massively in just two years. ~ learn more

better doing 🎯

Introverts should (sometimes) act like extroverts. “Though there’s nothing wrong with being an introvert, several studies have shown that when introverts occasionally behave in extroverted ways, they experience more “positive affect” — science-speak for good feelings.” ~ learn more

How modern buying broke attribution models. Adam Goyette highlights how 91% of marketers see attribution as critical, yet only 31% trust their models. This disconnect leads to “misallocation at scale” as companies chase inaccurate clarity in complex buying journeys shaped by AI-assisted discovery. ~ learn more

Thinking-Fast, Slow, and Artificial. A play on Daniel Kahneman’s book title introduces a new type of thinking: System 3. The introduction of a “Tri-System Theory” suggests a third, artificial system that “can supplement or supplant internal processes, introducing novel cognitive pathways.” This can lead to a phenomenon termed “cognitive surrender,” wherein individuals adopt AI outputs with minimal scrutiny. ~ learn more

to your health ⚕

A critical take on ChatGPT Health. “[ChatGPT] Health is safer at the population level, but less useful at the individual level. It’s too tethered to narrow guidelines, too eager to disclaim rather than reason, and just overall intellectually flat.” She’s sticking to plain ol’ ChatGPT which will engage more deeply in discussion, rather than giving her milquetoast answers and ushering her off to a doctor. ~ learn more

retail therapy 💸

Driverless vans in China are unstoppable. “In China, driverless delivery vans have become a total meme, they plow through crumbling roads, fresh concrete, motorcycles, anything. Nothing stops them.” Your delivery is on the way! ~ learn more

under the microscope 🔬

Peanut allergy treatment progress. “The median tolerated dose increased from 30 mg (equivalent to approximately 1/8th of a peanut) to 3000 mg (12 peanuts) at the exit challenge, representing a 100-fold increase.” This phase II trial shows promising results for peanut oral immunotherapy in adults, achieving desensitization and improving quality of life in the participants. ~ learn more

big ideas 📚

NYT on ocean alkalinity enhancement. “The nascent field of ocean-based climate interventions is currently straddling a rift between scientific consensus and public perception. Many experts are finding that even if they secure the support of their colleagues and the necessary legal permissions, fostering trust and understanding among the public remains a challenge.” They make a passing mention of Planetary Technologies: “Last June, it became the first of these companies to deliver verified carbon-removal credits to its high-profile customers, which include British Airways, Stripe and Shopify.” ~ learn more

on the blockchain ⛓

Zcash core developers rage quit. In an abrupt move, "Zcash’s core dev team just rage quit," causing a 25% drop in its market cap within 48 hours. This fallout stems from internal disagreement over funding control, forcing the devs to set up independently. ~ learn more

thanks for reading!

🗑️ We returned home from our mountain vacation to discover our trash bin was missing. I had to rewind almost an entire week of security camera footage to figure out what happened. A brazen theft in broad daylight! I hope whoever took it really needed it, and that it serves them as faithfully as it has served us.

🧮 ChatGPT officially counts better than me. As I began to write this week’s issue I was curious to recall what date my very first newsletter hit inboxes. I told the AI last week’s send date and issue # and asked it to figure it out. It did some calculations and gave me a date. I checked and that date was wrong. I accused it of screwing up, and it politely told me that I must have skipped a week. It turns out that I am the one who screwed up. In May 2025 I used the same issue number twice in a row. All hail the AI revolution.

fun facts 🙌

Jingle bells, batman smells. This playful study explores the many variants of "Jingle Bells (Batman Smells)" across the globe. ~ learn more

Decline of cash credited for drop in NHS surgery for children swallowing objects. "Historically, coins accounted for over 75% of objects swallowed by children under six years old, and fewer coins in homes due to contactless payments have likely helped reduce the number of these procedures." ~ learn more

Selling plasma reduces payday loans and increases retail spending. “After a plasma center opens nearby, demand for payday loans falls by over 13% among young borrowers.” The paper suggests that plasma donation helps individuals avoid high-interest loans by providing an alternative source of discretionary income. ~ learn more

tech, startups, internet ⚡

OpenAI’s $6.5B stylus play. “It sounds ridiculous. It sounds like Silicon Valley has finally run out of ideas and started raiding the stationary cupboard. But here’s the thing: They laughed at the AirPods, too. They looked like broken toothbrushes. Now they generate more revenue than Spotify.” Their new AI-powered pen aims to address a major bottleneck in human-computer interaction: the keyboard. ~ learn more

NVIDIA’s going to drive cars now. CEO Jensen Huang explains: “It’s trained end-to-end. Literally from camera in to actuation out; It reasons what action it is about to take, the reason by which it came about that action, and the trajectory.” ~ learn more

AI’s second-order impacts. “The second-order impacts of AI are the most interesting thing to invest in in 2026.” Isn’t it convenient when someone else does the pre-work for us? ~ learn more

better doing 🎯

Warren Buffett’s timeless investing lessons. “In 1998, Warren Buffett gave a 1-hour masterclass on how to never lose money investing.” He was speaking to an MBA class and explained to them his concept of “the 10% ownership test,” among other things. ~ learn more

The suck is why we’re here. “The more I think about it, the happier I am that AI is transforming the world of writing. In a way, I think it’ll make it even easier to stand out—because the more people take shortcuts, the less quality will remain for readers to flock to, even if the overall quantity of options is much larger.” ~ learn more

Try the Napoleon technique. “[Napoleon’s] practice, when general in Italy, in regard to his burdensome correspondence. He directed Bourrienne to leave all letters unopened for three weeks, and then observed with satisfaction how large a part of the correspondence had thus disposed of itself and no longer required an answer.” ~ learn more

retail therapy 💸

A rogue hacker. These unsuspecting retailers were just living their ordinary lives when someone hacked a Shopify app they had installed and, "ran a script to refund millions of dollars in seconds... crazy." The internet is a dangerous place. ~ learn more

under the microscope 🔬

I genetically engineered myself to fix lactose intolerance. “Recently my friend Gabriel Licina, renowned biohacker and genetic engineer, gave me access to the tools and materials I needed to make a therapy that could potentially fix the issue.” The therapy employs an AAV virus to tackle lactose intolerance, a personal mission years in the making. ~ learn more

The evolution of bacteria. “The longest-running and most celebrated of modern evolution experiments is the appropriately named Long-Term Evolution Experiment (LTEE). Started by Richard Lenski in 1988 at the University of California, Irvine, and continuing in the hands of Jeffrey Barrick at the University of Texas at Austin, the LTEE has been running nearly continuously for 80,000 generations of E. coli over nearly 40 years. This is equivalent to two million years of human evolution.” ~ learn more

big ideas 📚

Inflatable space stations. “Volume restrictions are why inflatable stations, like the ones modeled on Goodyear tires proposed early on in the space age, may be ready for a comeback. Volume is a problem they do not face: the difference is like carrying a packed tent in a backpack versus trying to fit a prefabricated modular home into a bag.” ~ learn more

Data centers’ water usage debated. Despite numerous headlines suggesting otherwise, “data centers have not raised household water bills at all, anywhere.” The concern over data centers affecting local water costs turns out unfounded. ~ learn more

Dr. Keefer does not like Meta’s nuclear power plans. “Choosing a vaporware, pre-revenue nuclear startup for 16 so-called ‘advanced’ 75 MWe sodium fast reactors, a rehashed 1960s technology that has never proven itself commercially.” The skepticism lies in the clash between Silicon Valley’s fast-paced ambition and nuclear power’s rigorous risk management. ~ learn more

on the blockchain ⛓

Crypto faces a reckoning. “In crypto today, we can definitively say that the tide has gone out. And it’s not coming back in until all the naked swimmers have been exposed.” The crypto industry’s glory days of easy gains have passed, revealing the underlying need for robust business models and investor relations akin to public companies. ~ learn more

profiles of people 🚶

Larry Gies: scaling purpose to 25,000 employees. For a brief moment in time Larry and I guest spoke to the same class at the University of Illinois. On average that year, each of us guest speakers donated $15 million to the University. Of course that was all thanks to Larry, whose name now graces the Gies College of Business. “Founder and CEO of Madison Industries Larry Gies chats with Ravin and Al about building a business, finding purpose, raising kids, and fixing the USA.” ~ learn more

thanks for reading!

🌬️ As we drove through West Texas we encountered a stretch of road where we felt utterly surrounded by wind turbines. ChatGPT research led me to learn about Sweetwater Wind Farm and Roscoe Wind Farm, which together had over 1,000 turbines in the immediate area. Then I found this interesting 2007 article: “The wind project is largely due to the vision of a one-armed, 65-year-old cotton farmer named Cliff Etheredge.” Also I found this handy U.S. Wind Turbine Database.

fun facts 🙌

What an unprocessed photo looks like. “Far from being an ‘unedited’ photo: there’s a huge amount of math that’s gone into making an image that nicely represents what the subject looks like in person.” This deep dive into camera sensor data shows the intricate steps required just to approach what our eyes perceive naturally. ~ learn more

Growing up in China’s “404 Not Found”. This secret Chinese nuclear city called 404 wasn’t on any map. Built in the Gobi Desert in 1958, it housed elite scientists and workers focused on atomic bomb production. Life there was harsh but uniquely prestigious. ~ learn more

British Prison leaders worried about drone escapes. Inmates might be lifted out of prisons using drones capable of carrying the average British man, warns the president of the Prison Governors Association. "Logistically, the threat is all there now," he cautions, as organized crime gangs could leverage agricultural drones like the DJI’s Agras T100 to execute daring escapes. ~ learn more

Top UK comedy club bans audience members with botox. “In a drastic move, those with botox will be unable to see similar stars live at the London venues after stand-up acts shared concerns that audience members with frozen faces aren’t reacting to their jokes.” ~ learn more

tech, startups, internet ⚡

The Frontier in 2025. This is great! “How did the world change this year? Which results are speculative? Which are biggest, if true? We collected and scored 202 results. Filter by field, our best guess of the probability that they generalise, or their impact if they do.” ~ learn more

The world needs a better measure of manufacturing output than GDP. “the fundamental problem is that economics treats manufacturing as a flow (inputs, outputs, productivity per hour) when the strategic question is actually about stock. what capabilities exist? who holds them? are they regenerating or depleting?” ~ learn more

better doing 🎯

What’s going on here, with this human? “When I try to figure out what game I’m playing, I see that for the last 25 years I have been playing a game of strategy applied to people, a game where over and over I try to answer the question “what’s going on here, with this human?” In this essay, I make recommendations about candidate selection based on thousands of assessments I have made and my somewhat obsessive interest in the topic.” ~ learn more

to your health ⚕

Overuse of noise-cancelling headphones? “You have almost created this false environment by wearing those headphones of only listening to what you want to listen to.” Some audiologists are concerned that this could impact the brain’s ability to process complex sounds. ~ learn more

retail therapy 💸

Google Maps as market maker. The app is not just reflecting, but actively organizing urban demand, transforming restaurant survival “into a cumulative-advantage dynamic that looks remarkably similar to the way capital compounds in financial markets.” ~ learn more

When odds become absurd. “You’d need to play Powerball for roughly 5.6 million years to have a 50% chance of winning once.” This website shows two lotteries being played every second, making the astronomical odds of a jackpot win visible in real-time. ~ learn more

under the microscope 🔬

The power of surrogate endpoints. “Surrogate endpoints: measurable intermediate biological signals that reliably predict clinical benefit, such as biomarkers or imaging readouts.” By utilizing these proxies, clinical trials can be significantly expedited, decreasing costs and increasing efficiency in drug development. ~ learn more

The power of urolithin A. “This study is that critical first step and shows that urolithin A can safely enhance immune function in humans,” says Dr. Dominic Denk. Found in foods like pomegranates and walnuts, this compound rejuvenates immune cells, potentially broadening cancer treatment efficacy and slowing middle-age cellular decline. ~ learn more

big ideas 📚

You might soon believe in aliens. “Luckily, if you start investigating aliens today, you can be at just the right time to be part of the “early majority” – your friends will remember that you were talking about it just before it became popular, but after the New York Times published testimony from US Navy pilots that they’d seen objects doing things that no known human technology can do.” ~ learn more

thanks for reading!

🤠 We’ve enjoyed a quiet Christmas week in Austin before we head to Colorado for a fun family ski trip. Wishing you a fantastic end to 2025 as we brace ourselves for whatever craziness 2026 has in store for us!

fun facts 🙌

I taught an octopus piano (it took 6 months). This Youtube creator has earned some high praise in the comment section: “I work as a behavioral neuroscientist and I can honestly, without hyperbole, say that this is genuinely cutting edge research. I mean it. I don’t know if you’re an academic or not outside of youtube, but if not I just want to be clear: you could earn a doctorate doing what you just did, I’ve read dissertations way dumber and way less relevant.” ~ learn more

The deepest hole on Earth. Dug by the Soviets in competition with the US, the Kola Superdeep Borehole is “roughly one-third of the way through the outer crust to the mantle.” Sounds deep, I guess, but is that really the best humanity can do? ~ learn more

Luxury wasp nests as home decor. Indoors, these nests transform into striking sculptures that “elevate living spaces” and convey an “air of danger,” according to Anthony Vesnaver of Newburgh Vintage Emporium. Priced up to $250, they’re an unexpected addition to chic interiors. ~ learn more

The Real Housewives of Moscow. Alina Rotenberg’s story provides a glimpse into the lives of Moscow’s élite women, who, while outwardly representing wealth and beauty, face fierce competition in the city’s "battle for men." “A man values a woman a lot more if she is constantly dragging presents out of him,” one learns at the Academy of Private Life, a place where women are taught strategies to capture rare marital commitment in a cutthroat environment. ~ learn more

tech, startups, internet ⚡

Google brings on the AI deflation. “Google’s latest model underprices the state of the art by 70% to 79%, with very similar levels of performance.” ~ learn more

What exactly is Production Capital? The term refers to “a wide and growing range of approaches for financing the emerging physical technologies aimed at transforming critical industries like energy, aerospace and defense, manufacturing, materials, and transportation.” This piece sketches a complex mosaic of emerging firms poised to deploy trillions in capital. ~ learn more

Stripe research confirms money helps grow businesses. A nearly two-year randomized trial revealed that businesses accepting loans from Stripe Capital “grew annual revenue around 27% faster.” Patrick Collison emphasizes this highlights the persistent issue of capital scarcity for many businesses. ~ learn more

Is it a bubble? Here’s how Howard Marks of Oaktree Capital sees it. “Memories are short, and prudence and natural risk aversion are no match for the dream of getting rich on the back of a revolutionary technology that ‘everyone knows’ will change the world.” ~ learn more

better doing 🎯

Thin desires consuming our lives. “We are living with a near-universal thin desire: wanting something that cannot actually be gotten, that we can’t define, from a source that has no interest in providing it.” Our modern world fuels these unsatisfying desires with technology, leaving true transformation and fulfillment in short supply. ~ learn more

to your health ⚕

Saltwater rinse and cold recovery. "Washing viruses out of your nose and throat can help you get better faster." In a trial with 66 adults, saline rinses shortened cold duration by nearly two days and reduced transmission at home. ~ learn more

retail therapy 💸

GenAI ads outperform human ones. "GenAI-created ads see 19% higher click-through rates than human-created ads." NYU and Emory researchers found that even product packaging influenced by Generative AI boosts creative performance. As usual, when AI usage was disclosed, it tanked performance. ~ learn more

The end of interchange. “Credit card companies have had a good run extracting interchange from merchants for the last forty years, but those days are coming to an end.” Fred Wilson’s a pretty good predictor of the future, but I don’t yet share this vision. ~ learn more

under the microscope 🔬

This frog knows its face. I’ve shared before about the discovery that tiny electrical fields help cells determine where a nose should be, for example. I can’t get enough of how cool this is. "Picasso tadpoles make largely normal frog faces. That’s amazing— all the organs start off in abnormal positions, yet they still end up making a pretty good frog face.” Michael Levin’s work suggests cellular ‘intelligence’ that challenges the blueprint view of DNA. ~ learn more

Algae as asphalt’s green hero. “Algae-derived compounds can improve moisture resistance, flexibility and self-healing behavior in asphalt, potentially extending pavement life and reducing maintenance costs,” says Assoc. Prof. Elham Fini. ~ learn more

Plants’ secret language revealed. Scientists have unraveled a century-old mystery of how plants communicate stress. “We are trying to build a foundational knowledge of understanding how communication in plants happens,” explains Vesna Bacheva. The study shows plants use negative pressure within their vasculature to send mechanical and chemical signals responding to stressors. ~ learn more

thoughts of food 🍔

Diet Coke’s ‘It Girl’ moment. Count me in for one! Yet, I refuse to let my kids try it. The soda has made a major comeback, embraced by Gen Z as the “fridge cigarette” for its refreshing qualities minus the nicotine. This nostalgic yet current appeal has positioned Diet Coke as a lifestyle brand, capturing a mix of “comfort and confidence.” ~ learn more

Chicago’s vegan scene contracts. In recent years, the city has witnessed a retreat in its plant-based dining options. “Despite the once-rising popularity of vegan and vegetarian cuisine, many establishments are now shuttering as diners return to traditional meats.” I sent this to a vegan friend and he replied: “I know!!!! It’s crazy!” ~ learn more

teaching the kids 👩‍🏫

Digital devices and education decline. “The standardized test scores of American students had been rising for decades. Then they began to slide, dropping to their lowest point in two decades in 2023 and 2024.” Devices like laptops and tablets may not be helping, as school-issued ones often allow distractions beyond educational use. ~ learn more

Marginal returns to public universities. “This paper studies the returns to enrolling in American public universities by comparing the long-term outcomes of barely admitted versus barely rejected applicants. … The typical marginally admitted student gains an additional year of education in the four-year sector, becomes 12 percentage points more likely to ever earn a bachelor’s degree, and eventually earns 8 percent more than their marginally rejected but otherwise identical counterpart.” Check out the appendix for interesting charts. ~ learn more

thanks for reading!

🤖 I was driving behind a Waymo the other day. It was taking a right turn at an intersection with a short green light cycle. In the middle of the turn it started slowing down for no apparent reason. I was annoyed because I didn’t want to get stuck waiting for another light cycle. I was about to honk at it when I realized that honking at a robotaxi isn’t going to get me anywhere. How are we supposed to express displeasure at the robots who share the road with us? Alas, I guess this is one of the downsides of the future! Driverless cars are still a great trade, in my humble opinion.

👋 I hope that you enjoy this week’s newsletter. Each week, I’m honored that you invite me into your inbox. If it’s been a while since we’ve connected, please do drop me a line as I’d love to hear from you! Happy holidays to all!

fun facts 🙌

I skied down Mount Everest (world first, no oxygen). Andrzej Bargiel “becomes the first person to climb Mount Everest and ski back to Everest Base Camp without supplementary oxygen.” After nearly 16 hours in the “death zone,” he made history on skis. ~ learn more

The rapid decline of horses. “Then, between 1930 and 1950, 90% of the horses in the US disappeared.” The shift from horse power to engine power was abrupt, despite two centuries of gradual technological advancements. ~ learn more

Monogamy: Humans vs. meerkats and beavers. Humans are surprisingly monogamous, ranking “between meerkats and beavers” in a study measuring full sibling rates to infer mating patterns. The research uses genetic data to place humans in a “premier league of monogamy” among mammals. ~ learn more

oh, chicago 🏆

Predicting murder without a totalitarian state. Chicago’s data-driven approach suggests “murder can be predicted and we can prevent it from happening.” Recent records forecasted shooting risks accurately, with a shocking 13% of high-risk individuals getting shot within 18 months. ~ learn more

tech, startups, internet ⚡

Al Goldstein tells the Pangea Properties story. This comes from a fantastic entrepreneur who saw opportunity where everyone else saw risk. “In late 2008 (a full month after I officially left Enova), while banks were imploding, we started buying foreclosed apartments on Chicago’s South and West Sides that no one else wanted. … This is the unglamorous, rejection-filled, wildly rewarding story of Pangea Properties—from boarding up windows ourselves to building a 500+ employee team, a winding road to exit, and everything in between.” ~ learn more

The $1B Al company training ChatGPT, Claude & Gemini. Surge AI, with fewer than 100 employees, “surpassed $1 billion in revenue last year, completely bootstrapped—the fastest company in history to reach this milestone.” This is an opinionated interview with Edwin Chen, its founder. ~ learn more

Hack reveals the phone farm flooding TikTok with Al influencers. “The hacker also shared a list with me of more than 400 TikTok accounts Doublespeed operates. Around 200 of those were actively promoting products on TikTok, mostly without disclosing the posts were ads, according to 404 Media’s review of them.” ~ learn more

Has the cost of building software just dropped 90%? “AI Agents … massively reduce the labour cost of developing software.” This transformative shift is due to agentic coding, which is streamlining processes that previously required entire teams, reducing project timelines from months to weeks. ~ learn more

better doing 🎯

The trap of pure incentive thinking. “When you start seeing every human interaction as a game-theoretic puzzle, you lose access to information that matters.” By reducing relationships to mere transactions, you risk losing out on genuine partnerships and trust. ~ learn more

Most problems are people problems. “Most technical problems are really people problems.” In tackling technical debt, it’s often the human issues—such as outdated habits, unclear requirements, and unrealistic deadlines—that are the root causes. ~ learn more

to your health ⚕

To get more effective drugs, we need more human trials. “Even if approval requirements were relaxed, the underlying need would remain: we still have to learn, through testing in humans, which treatments are effective and which are not.” Clinical development is a costly stage in drug discovery but crucial for determining a therapy’s real-world efficacy. Focusing more on this phase could unlock significant potential in drug innovation. ~ learn more

retail therapy 💸

Cannabis reclassified to Schedule III. Weed will now be much less illegal nationally, but with plenty of gray area and contradictory laws. “Trump ordered agencies to begin the formal process of reclassifying cannabis as a drug with medical value and lower abuse potential.” ~ learn more

under the microscope 🔬

Meet targeted protein degraders. “Targeted Protein Degraders (TPDs) are a revolutionary class of drugs that hijack the cell’s natural waste disposal system to eliminate disease-causing proteins, rather than just inhibiting them.” By leveraging the cell’s own machinery, TPDs promise potent new therapies for cancers and other hard-to-treat disorders. ~ learn more

big ideas 📚

South Korea’s population disaster . Holy cow! “If current fertility rates persist, every hundred South Koreans today will have only six great-grandchildren between them.” This dire projection highlights the country’s profound demographic crisis, driven by extreme career-motherhood conflicts and an intensive parenting culture. ~ learn more

on the blockchain ⛓

Crypto scandal in Argentina. “Javier Milei involved the presidential investiture to allow the alleged $LIBRA scam to effectively take place: without his tweet, $LIBRA would not have had the volume of purchases it did.” The congressional report paints a picture of deliberate misconduct tied to Argentina’s president. ~ learn more

Heating homes with crypto. “I’ve seen bitcoin rigs running quietly in attics, with the heat they generate rerouted through the home’s ventilation system to offset heating costs.” ~ learn more

thanks for reading!