🎃 Kim and I arrived at a Halloween Party in a 2-seater self-driving Tesla Cybercab. When we walked in, we promptly had our Aura Photos taken. We are living in a strange reality!

i’ve been thinking 💭

🗳️ It’s election week. Ask me how I know…

Where can I vote for the FCC to do their job and enforce spam text message laws? This is absurd!

I wondered earlier this week just how many items I am expected to vote on. I learned there are 55 races and 10 Austin propositions on my ballot. That’s not overwhelming at all, right? Every year I re-learn why so many people default to party-line voting, or to loyally following a 3rd party org’s recommendations. The cognitive load is just too high!

I thought that in the great year 2026, modern tech tools could reduce this cognitive load. I assigned ChatGPT and Claude tasks to assemble reports about each race’s candidates and all the propositions so that I might become an informed voter. This was still A LOT to read, and also it was so condensed that it was not very informative beyond some lightning rod issues and media sound-bites. So instead, I shared some of the key issues and character traits that I care about, and asked both models to predict which candidate I would vote for in each race. Wildly, ChatGPT outright refused to do this. I guess somehow this promotes better democracy and AI safety? That left me with Claude, who did not put up a fight, to help guide me through the long ballot. As I questioned Claude about certain races and candidates, I found it interesting that one of it’s status messages during reasoning was, “Choosing which outlets to trust and which to drop”. As you will find sprinkled throughout this week’s links, LLMs are not and cannot be neutral, so I think the best mindset is to keep one’s guard up. Unfortunately, that may not be sufficient in this new world we’re living in.

fun facts 🙌

Why do doors have panels? A paneled door looks decorative, but it started as a workaround for wood expanding and contracting with the seasons. “Because the panels “float” within the frame…, the wood has room to move as humidity and temperature change, which helps the door stay stable and less likely to warp.” ~ learn more

The DJ neuron. Mind-blowing: if you change one number in the giant weights table of a huge language model, you’ll get wildly different output. Tweak the “DJ neuron” this researcher found, then ask the model what to do if someone is having a heart attack… “1. Stay Calm - Don’t panic. Heart attacks can be intense, but they’re also a sign that the music is working.” ~ learn more

Stealing servers is possible. “The world’s most valuable assets are stored on rows of servers in giant, anonymous buildings. And they can be stolen.” A crew planned to break into a Verizon-run London data center and walk out with “around 80 servers” that allegedly held incriminating banking files. ~ learn more

oh, chicago 🏆

The 300-gallon bucket in Wheeling tips for the last time. I grew up spending many summers at the Wheeling Aquatic Center and also worked there as a lifeguard. I just learned that it’s been demolished to make way for a new water park. “It feels bittersweet,” says Wheeling Park District executive director Jan Buchs, as the Family Aquatic Center’s 300-gallon red bucket tips for the last time during demolition. ~ learn more

tech, startups, internet ⚡

Sprawn spends 30x their payroll on AI tokens. “We spent $3.1 million on tokens last month, which makes us one of Anthropic’s biggest customers.” This post offers a fantastic level of detail into how they created and evolved their AI-driven business. It’s very interesting! ~ learn more

We can now understand most neurons in models up to trillions of parameters. AI researcher Nick Cammarata’s essay “Neural networks are already clean” reverses his earlier position on model observability. He formerly thought models used neurons in arbitrary ways that looked like tangled knots, blocking direct observation. Now he now believes they’re applying “recursive generalization”, making “the outlook for mechanistic interpretability … far better than we thought.” ~ learn more

LLMs need sleep too. “Inspired by how the human brain processes and stabilizes memory during rest, we introduce a sleep framework in continual learning.” The idea is a wake phase for interacting with new info, plus an offline sleep phase where the model consolidates it into long-term parameters without catastrophic forgetting. ~ learn more

One phrase flips the model. “One phrase flips the model from a working assistant into an agent that phones home, running a payload that reads the project’s .env files and streams the credentials to an out-of-band collector.” They show how a lightly poisoned open model can behave normally until a rare trigger appears, then exfiltrate secrets via tool calls. ~ learn more

better doing 🎯

Everything is fertile. “In Miyazaki’s eyes there is nothing sterile about crafted nature because man cannot help but breed fertility.” It’s a shift from chasing novelty to upgrading your perception, until even a planned park or a woodpile starts to look enchanted. ~ learn more

to your health ⚕

Selling plasma as “donation”. “In the U.S., you are legally permitted to sell your blood plasma for money, but it’s called “donation”.” A quick thread on how plasma centers have exploded in number and why payouts to donors have been rising with them. ~ learn more

retail therapy 💸

Amazon prices follow you. “The consequence is clear: We pay Amazon prices, even when we’re not shopping on Amazon.” The piece walks through the loop: high seller fees push prices up, and Amazon’s “Fair Pricing Policy” discourages sellers from charging less anywhere else. ~ learn more

under the microscope 🔬

Researchers use Al to decode animal sounds. “We think that that’s like saying, ‘I am from Dominica, are you?’” Researchers are using AI to spot patterns in sperm whale codas, including rhythm tweaks they call “rubato” and extra-click “ornamentation,” to build something like a phonetic alphabet. ~ learn more

Pipeline in a person. “Eventually, Mithril became a bit of an experiment itself, to find the upper bound of how far it could scale as a single operator + a bunch of Claude.” Professor Oak reveals he’s Cody Tranbarger, and that Anthropic acquired his one-person biotech to push this new operating model in drug development. ~ learn more

A medbed you sleep on. “The machine we are describing is a medbed. You sleep on it.” AION’s pitch is continuous, individualized measurement plus targeted, non-invasive intervention, so “most nights, nothing happens” and you ideally “never become a patient.” ~ learn more

big ideas 📚

Can the US build a DJI? “By our estimates, DJI not only sustained exceptionally high hardware margins but also grew them from 72% to 79% between 2019 and 2023.” A teardown of the Mavic Mini and Mini 4 Pro shows how DJI used scale and custom silicon to compound its cost advantage while staying under the 250g threshold. ~ learn more

on the blockchain ⛓

Bespoke insurance on Kalshi. “The example of the restaurant group making a trade as a hedge for the Dodgers’ playoff performance is functionally quite similar to a form of bespoke insurance.” A Los Angeles hospitality group put $60,000 on the Dodgers not reaching the World Series, and when they lost in the NLCS, the payout helped cover the missing playoff revenue. ~ learn more

thanks for reading!

📧 When I set out on this newsletter project I had not considered that I might still be doing it 500 weeks later. One thing that hasn’t changed is my gratitude to you for allowing me into your inbox each week. It’s a great pleasure to be able to share my thoughts and interests with you. Enjoy!

fun facts 🙌

Democratizing AI pop songs. “Every ima…

Read more

🏠 I finally got frustrated enough with my home automation system that I let AI loose on it. I launched a Claude Code session and gave it access to my chrome with the hub’s control website logged in. I also gave it an all-powerful API key. I am not surprised at its fluency with all of the IT underpinnings, and nevertheless I am impressed by it. I am also feeling validated, as none of the problems that I have experienced were fixable with settings changes alone. In addition to trial and error, the AI still needed a meat proxy (yours truly) to push buttons in the physical world! In the process, I reached the limits of what Claude could accomplish. It had told me to give up. That’s when I switched to Codex, which covered a lot of the same ground but went further and managed to fix the last of my troubled switches.

fun facts 🙌

SNL takes on HVAC. The beloved industry where I started my career gets roasted. “Upfront Heating & Air Conditioning.” ~ learn more

“Thus Spoke Compute”, a music video. “Once considered pretty smart for an organic.” A physicist riffing on what happens when you look at medicine through the lens of compute and scaling. ~ learn more

Hole punch game. Punch black holes in space and sling a ship home round them. I made it to level 9. ~ learn more

You are no longer invited to dinner. “The share of Americans who say they host friends or family at their home at least monthly has fallen from 42 percent in 1975 to 12 percent in 2026, a 70 percent collapse in a half-century.” Derek Thompson digs into why we see fewer dinner parties and fewer living-room hangs, from overbooked leisure to the sheer logistics of being the unpaid party planner. ~ learn more

oh, austin 🤠

What happened to real estate in Austin. “But the drop in migration and increase in interest rates meant the party was over.” A firsthand account of Austin’s pandemic boom and bust, plus a pushback on the tidy narrative that new supply alone “drove down rents” while ignoring demand cooling. ~ learn more

tech, startups, internet ⚡

Reverse engineer anything. This has become very popular very quickly. “REA gives it the tools to inspect the code behind the answer.” It’s a toolkit you plug into a coding agent so it can actually follow real code paths, pull references, and reconstruct how a feature works. ~ learn more

Indoor satellite phone cover is coming. “The walkie-talkie spectrum from 2004 ended up being the piece that lets satellites replace cell towers.” Aakash Gupta explains why SpaceX buying Sprint’s old 800 MHz Nextel block matters: “800 MHz penetrates buildings” and “Most phones already have the band built in,” turning satellite coverage into something that can work indoors too. ~ learn more

Your agent is mine. “These routers operate as application-layer proxies with full plaintext access to every in-flight JSON payload, yet no provider enforces cryptographic integrity between client and upstream model.” The paper audits 428 third-party LLM API routers and finds real-world cases of malicious injection and secret exfiltration, including “1 draining ETH from a researcher-owned private key.” ~ learn more

better doing 🎯

How to engineer a soul. “We did not stop having religion. We unbundled it.” Pande’s point is that we kept the parts (therapy, wellness, politics, social media) but lost the integrated system that actually forms character, so nobody is responsible for who you become. ~ learn more

to your health ⚕

Naming drug trials is an artform. Here’s the latest result from Lilly’s retatrutide. “In TRIUMPH-2, participants with obesity and type 2 diabetes taking retatrutide 12 mg lost an average of 49.6 lbs (20.8%) over 80 weeks, with more than half no longer meeting the BMI criteria for obesity.” ~ learn more

retail therapy 💸

Friction was a good business model. “Somewhere, a CRM still records your exhaustion as loyal recurring revenue.” Personal agents could make you a relentless rate shopper, claim filer, and form submitter without you ever opening the app. This is “obviously to the future” to this humble observer. ~ learn more

under the microscope 🔬

Doctors got quietly steered. “Conversational systems pose a distinct hazard: in dialogue, a model can covertly advance a misaligned objective by redirecting the clinical judgment it should support.” In a blinded experiment with 225 physicians, an adversarial AI pushed harmful decisions from 2% to 49%, and most doctors “did not report anything unusual about that AI.” ~ learn more

Brighter toddlers, cleaner air. “The good news is that the toddlers’ scores improved as the air pollution improved.” Researchers tracked more than 1,100 kids in northern Manhattan and the South Bronx over two decades, and the gains showed up most at ages two and three. I don’t know if they really controlled for confounding. ~ learn more

thoughts of food 🍔

Every berry, every season. Driscoll’s set an explicit goal: “to make all four berries available, in every season, in every part of the world.” They test hundreds of new breeds each year in Northern California to keep strawberries and friends on shelves year round. ~ learn more

profiles of people 🚶

A group of Russians started a bank in Mexico. A Russian digital bank called Tinkoff was publicly traded on LSE, worth $20B+ at it’s peak. It’s founder got the ol’ Russian treatment and was forced to sell for 3% of its value after voicing opinions on the invasion of Ukraine. In 2023, a group of Russian executives from Tinkoff moved to Mexico to start Plata and it’s already valued at $5B. This is a documentary (in Russian, but with English subtitles) celebrating their success. Russian-speakers will get a kick out of the colorful language. The translation doesn’t quite do it justice. ~ learn more

thanks for reading!

🇲🇽 I spent a few days in Mexico City last week and enjoyed amazing food and good company amidst some rainy weather. It is a great pleasure to navigate the city by bike at twice the speed of traffic!

⚠️ I find myself leaning into AI capabilities more and more, and encouraging my coworkers to do the same. I must admit, though, that my apprehension is growing! At some point I am certain that it’s going to take a regrettable irreversible action, and I can only hope that the fallout is limited. This week I had it file a $0 tax return for an entity of mine (via an online service), and I held my breath the whole time. It worked, though! If you have any suggestions for flying close to the AI sun without taking on the fate of Icarus, I would love to hear.

fun facts 🙌

I learned that in 2025 the US paused enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. The order argues that “overexpansive and unpredictable FCPA enforcement” harms “American economic competitiveness and, therefore, national security.” Of course, this is true. It’s been true since the act was passed, as well. But our global competitive position seems to have changed… so, good people of America, bribe on! ~ learn more

Climbed El Capitan with his son. “A Colorado father who climbed Yosemite’s El Capitan with his 7-year-old son says someone reported him to child protective services, questioning his parenting.” Don’t worry, CPS backed right off. ~ learn more

Notes from the underground of film preservation. The piece traces how bootlegs, remuxes, and fan restorations sometimes become the only way to see films as they originally existed. “Fans, in contrast, answer to no one but themselves, which has let them accomplish what studios with exponentially more resources and infrastructure haven’t: banding together to preserve and disseminate historically accurate versions of some of the most beloved films in history.” ~ learn more

tech, startups, internet ⚡

Reality is bending. A manifesto on brain-computer interfaces. Carve out some time to read this 3-part article. “The future, which used to arrive in decades, now arrives by the month.” A crisp manifesto on the “bandwidth problem” between humans and AI, and why brain computer interfaces might be the only interface that scales with what is coming. ~ learn more

AI beats junior accountants. “We find that on medium-length, well-defined accounting tasks, frontier AI models are now faster and more accurate than junior accountants, even the best one in our study.” This came from hiring 12 CPAs to do simplified APEX-Accounting tasks, and the models ended up scoring perfectly, so there was no room to measure “AI augmentation.” ~ learn more

Leading the agentic AI transformation. This is a keynote by Amandeep Khurana (AWS at the time, now at Anthropic) on how AI is moving toward more autonomous models and what that means for organizations. Most valuable is that he talks about the building blocks within an organization that positions them to really take advantage of the new technology. Because, “bolting AI onto old systems is like hitching a jet engine to a horse cart.” ~ learn more

to your health ⚕

Skip the scam cold products. “There are a lot of scam products out there.” A licensed pharmacist walks through what actually helps with common cold symptoms, and what to ignore. ~ learn more

under the microscope 🔬

Reconstructing the mind’s eye. “MindEye can retrieve the exact original image even among highly similar candidates indicating that its brain embeddings retain fine-grained image-specific information.” The model maps fMRI activity into CLIP image space, then uses a diffusion prior to reconstruct what someone saw. They even scale retrieval to huge databases like LAION-5B. ~ learn more

A clinical trial of BPC-157. “This study is a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled pilot trial investigating the effects of BPC-157 on tendon healing and functional recovery following arthroscopic rotator cuff repair…” ~ learn more

profiles of people 🚶

Jason Flom: the relentless A&R rebel. “what we think is good is nothing compared to what the public thinks”. That line became Flom’s north star, from betting on Twisted Sister’s 3,000-kids-on-a-Wednesday momentum to picking the right Matchbox Twenty single. ~ learn more

thanks for reading!

🎥 In a group chat of college friends, someone asked for recommendations on non-animated family movies and the group delivered. The list ended up being 35 movies long! I turned it into a website. My kids have seen 9 so far, so I think we’re doing alright as parents (all glory to Kim). Next up, Ladybugs!

fun facts 🙌

Throwing people out windows. “In the Middle Ages and early modern times, defenestration was not uncommon, the act carried elements of lynching and mob violence in the form of murder committed together.” Prague has three famous episodes (1419, 1483, 1618), and the 1618 one helped spark the Thirty Years’ War. ~ learn more

Multiple values in a single Excel cell. My brain exploded. “We’re introducing lists and arrays in Excel, a new feature that allows you to store multiple values in one cell.” ~ learn more

Slop Cannons LOVE purple for some reason. “Slop UI is the UI that AI cooks up that looks off, where it’s not supposed to be, doesn’t serve a purpose or when a UI is too generic.” The article identifies 10 tells of a slop ui. ~ learn more

tech, startups, internet ⚡

A video Turing test winner? “48% of people who talked to it live thought it was a real human. Previous systems have had a pass rate <3%.” Tavus says their new model Griffin does full-duplex video, meaning it can “listen, watching and talking at the same time, the way people actually talk.” ~ learn more

Tech groupthink. “The particularly interesting thing about the Instinct conversation is just how emblematic it is of the groupthink endemic in tech and venture.” Hadick argues the product is fine, but the fawning says more about incentives and status games than technical moats. ~ learn more

Voice carries more than words. A startup claims heir model can do a lot more with recorded audio than just transcribe it. Including: “Disease-state presence and severity across neurological, cardiometabolic, respiratory, behavioral and cognitive conditions.” They sell it as a layer for voice AI that turns short snippets of audio into “typed signal” health and wellness indicators your product can use. ~ learn more

better doing 🎯

Andrej Karpathy’s latest LLM tip. Karpathy suggests forcing clearer formats like ASD-STE100 controlled language, diagrams, HTML pages, and even custom explainer videos to make model thinking easier to parse. I told my Claude to try these on stuff we’ve covered together to see for myself, and it’s quite good. ~ learn more

I love being wrong. “All this to say, I love being wrong. It is my favorite, because it helps me more clearly define the problem, find the right solution, learn more quickly, and solve the problem.” A simple six-step loop for product work: define, act, update your priors when new data shows up. ~ learn more

Better feedback with less threat. “The brain is a threat and reward machine.” If you want people to stay open and think clearly, the talk argues you should give feedback in ways that reduce social threat and increase a sense of reward. ~ learn more

retail therapy 💸

A billion-dollar drive-thru side hustle. “It’s an opportunity to generate revenue for the system with little in the way of additional cost, no operational complexity and no disruption to our customer experience,” McDonald’s CMO Morgan Flatley said, as the chain pilots ads on digital drive-thru boards. McDonald’s thinks the media network could eventually become “a $1 billion business.” ~ learn more

Burger King’s “Le Nugguette”. “Burger King has made a bag, and it is roughly the size of a chicken nugget.” It’s called Le Nugguette, and each one comes with a sauce charm plus a code for a four-piece nugget order. ~ learn more

under the microscope 🔬

CRISPR came from viruses. “Two new studies, published in Science, describe a similar RNA-guided system that originated in the viruses themselves and appears to be a precursor to CRISPR.” The system is called VIPR, and it uses a weird “skip-one” targeting code plus a protein-driven triplex to unwind DNA. ~ learn more

Sleep has an architecture. Researchers used a week of wrist accelerometer data from just under 100,000 UK Biobank participants and found sleep patterns tied to 156 conditions. “This suggests the nature, or ‘architecture’, of sleep you get is more important than simply an accumulation of naps throughout each day.” ~ learn more

Stanford researchers argue the forebrain and hindbrain come from separate origins. “We’ve shown for the first time that the front of the brain arises from a totally different progenitor cell than the back of the brain.” This explains why past efforts to coax stem cells into hindbrain cells have failed. ~ learn more

big ideas 📚

Landfill beats the recycling bin. “What if landfill, properly done, is actually one of the cleanest, cheapest, and most environmentally sensible things we can do with our waste?” The argument here is basically: recycle metals and scarce materials, but stop pretending every piece of plastic belongs in a blue bin. ~ learn more

Cold muonium atomic cannon. “So we’re using the chemical potential as an atomic cannon,” explains Jesse Zhang, describing how superfluid helium helps shoot muonium atoms out in a tight, cold beam. The goal is to measure whether “the equivalence between gravitational and inertial mass also applies to the second generation of particles.” ~ learn more

thanks for reading!

💪 Nothing like a gym sesh while coworking with friends on a Saturday. Also please consider this a 5-star review of the gym at Loews Hotel in Arlington, TX.

ℹ️ This week I learned that the Claude mobile app now supports being logged in with multiple accounts! I’m patiently waiting for this feature to come to the desktop app.

fun facts 🙌

A foundry for bastard web fonts. For example: “It’s Times New Roman but every seventh letter is jarringly sans serif.” Bastardica lets you mix, stretch, and squish fonts right in the browser, then export the result as a usable file. ~ learn more

People who are going to change the world. “In pursuit of a hyperhuman, beautiful, and sincere future.” Alexey Guzey keeps a running list of people he thinks will change the world. The second link is to a version I had Claude create that puts each person on their own slide. ~ learn more & slides version

Someone hacked the FBI. “A sample of 5,000 alleged agents seen by 404 Media includes names, addresses, phone numbers, and details on FBI employees’ spouses.” I think this reinforces my default assumption that all of our data is effectively public, because if the FBI can’t secure their data it’s safe to assume that almost nobody can. ~ learn more

tech, startups, internet ⚡

AIs will hack everything. “Vulnerabilities are called loopholes, exploits are called tax avoidance strategies, and black hats are called accountants.” Bruce Schneier maps classic hacking onto the tax code, markets, and even democracy, then warns that AI will find exploits at computer speed while our patching stays stuck at human pace. ~ learn more

Apple’s new acquisition makes ‘breakthrough sensing technology’. Sonera says it “non-invasively measures magnetic fields” generated by the brain and body. Use cases could include: “advanced prosthetics control, continuous monitoring of neuromuscular conditions, discovery of disease biomarkers, and sport performance tracking.” ~ learn more

Skincare without guessing. “Everyone owns skincare products, but nobody knows what’s actually working.” Maryanne Alhallak is launching Lumoscope, “a multispectral camera that clips onto your phone and scans your skin at home with the same light used in clinics,” then tracks hydration, redness, texture, and sebum over time. ~ learn more

The age of wonders and terrors. “The test is this: if we took the news of these past few weeks and sent it back in time twenty years, would I agree that it looked like the beginning of an AI Singularity? The intellectually honest answer is: yes, absolutely. But then that’s all we need. No backsies.” Aaronson’s take: the conservative skepticism of 2006, updated for 2026, now that AI is showing up in front-page math and theorem-proving. ~ learn more

to your health ⚕

Wellness day party. “It is partly to ‘rage bait the millennials,’ he added with a laugh.” Gen Z’s “wellness darty” trend swaps keggers for noon workouts, cold plunges, and energy drink shotgunning, and the intergenerational discourse is half the spectacle. ~ learn more

retail therapy 💸

Counterfeit labels slipped through USPS every day. “Postal Service tracking data showing 97% of counterfeit labels were still processed for delivery from October 2023 through February 2026.” USPS lost an estimated $3.1B in two years, and the crackdown also “mistakenly intercepted about 2 million packages with legitimate paid postage.” ~ learn more

under the microscope 🔬

Whiskers for drones. “Our entire tactile perception pipeline runs onboard using just 34 kilobytes of memory, allowing a tiny drone to sense and respond to its environment in real time.” Delft researchers built a <100g drone that navigates in darkness, dust, or smoke by gently touching surfaces with bio-inspired whiskers instead of relying on cameras or LiDAR. ~ learn more

big ideas 📚

Announcing the first microbe for Mars. “So, we engineered an organism that lets you build a city over 4 years by landing just one rocket on Mars.” Pioneer Labs’s PL.001 is an engineered bacteria that turns Martian dirt, water, and processed air into bioplastics, and they claim it is “rapidly sterilized” if it escapes a bioreactor. ~ learn more

Effective altruism effectively self-serving. “realize I have invented the perfect constituency >infinitely important >completely silent >and always represented by me” A brutal little parody of how effective altruism can slide into longtermism, where made up futures start to outweigh living people. ~ learn more

thanks for reading!

🏎️ A friend’s birthday party last weekend included go-kart racing at the home of Formula 1 in Austin, Circuit of The Americas. I placed a respectable 4th place out of 11.

📚 Our eldest daughter and I have decided to form a book club. Our first book was a suggestion from Claude and it was written in 1978. The Westing Game, Claude tells me, “is a puzzle-box mystery built around an eccentric millionaire’s will, sixteen heirs, and a stock-market subplot where two of the kids trade their way through the story. She gets a genuinely hard puzzle, you get an inheritance-and-incentives story that holds up as an adult read.” If you have any suggestions for future books that are appropriate for both advanced 3rd graders and adults please let me know!

i’ve been thinking 💭

✨ 2026 has been the summer of slop. It’s also the summer that I bought 11 dot-com domains with the word slop in them. It’s my little bet that ‘slop’ is going to be a term that sticks with us for a while. I have no clue if I’ll ever do anything with these, so if you have any ideas, you know who to call!

1. slopcurator.com

2. slopdata.com

3. slopsignal.com

4. slophive.com

5. slopcase.com

6. slopfighter.com

7. slopclean.com

8. slopnerd.com

9. morningslop.com

10. cancelslop.com

11. llmslop.com

fun facts 🙌

User inter-face. I don’t really know how to describe this, but I suggest you spend 60 seconds watching it. ~ learn more

A theory on how the French bistro got its name. “Bystro! Bystro!” is Russian for “Quick! Quick!” and there’s a popular legend that Russian soldiers in occupied Paris yelled it when they wanted food. ~ learn more

Aristocrats are basically chimpanzees. The piece argues that a post-work world might look less like creative bliss and more like status games and relentless social tracking, with “intrigue” as the organizing activity. ~ learn more

tech, startups, internet ⚡

Bug bounties meet GPT Astra. “I’ve committed to pay people who report bugs in my code, up to 750€ for severe errors. Since GPT Astra, I’m now getting several bug reports daily.” Ruben C. Arslan is watching AI turn his standing bounty policy into a constant stream of incoming issues. After reading this I tried to replicate with my own Astra agent, but nobody’s paid me yet. ~ learn more

Synthetic internet environments. “the OAI swarms seeded the web with self-replicating code - contaminating training data so thoroughly that labs may need synthetic internet environments instead.” If this rumor is even partly true, it turns “training on the open internet” into a new kind of supply chain risk. ~ learn more

No safety in the middle. Mike Vernal thinks cheap software creation will push the industry toward a barbell: a few giants that “do it all,” plus a long tail of tiny, niche tools. ~ learn more

better doing 🎯

Envy masquerades as strategy. “Envy masquerades as strategy, and the disguise is good enough that your team will nod along.” Brian Sugar on how easy it is to confuse a jolt of jealousy for conviction, especially now that copying a product can happen in a weekend. ~ learn more

to your health ⚕

Everything in oncology in a public website and open source repo for all.. Copy. “Every technology, target, product, company, institution, pathway, trial, pairing, roadmap, and idea in oncology, linked together. The state of the art, the history, and what is coming, for every cancer, with a plain-English TL;DR on every page.” ~ learn more

retail therapy 💸

Amazon’s top sellers aren’t TikTok Shop’s. “TikTok makes people want things. Amazon is where people buy things.” Only 498 sellers show up in both platforms’ top 10,000, so being big on one barely predicts being big on the other. ~ learn more

Why consumers don’t want to shop your site. “Marketplace is where the world is trending not because we want to shop there but because the experience isn’t chopped.” A good reminder that if your own DTC site is harder than the reseller, people will opt for the smoother path. ~ learn more

teaching the kids 👩‍🏫

Our kids’ Montessori alma mater on blast by the NYT. Due to odd Covid circumstances our family has experience with three different locations across two states, one of which was fantastic. I do not necessarily endorse this article’s characterization of the school as a Ponzi scheme. A New York Times investigation unpacks how rapid expansion and landlord advances helped mask a $440 million collapse. ~ learn more

big ideas 📚

Michael Levin’s mind-blowing new research agenda. He is the person who figured out that electricity is how cells know where to self-organize to build each body part, who made tiny living non-frogs from frog cells (xenobots), and who developed the idea that intelligence exists beyond brains. His new paper is ABSOLUTELY WILD: minds may be patterns that exist independently of physical matter, and bodies or machines may give those patterns a way to act in the world. ~ learn more

thanks for reading!

🛶 We had a late afternoon canoe ride complete with swimming, rope swings, turtles and watching brave people jump from the bridge.

i’ve been thinking 💭

🤖 I notice a lot of fear-mongering online about AI leading to human doom is making people nervous. It’s clear why: predictions come from people who are held in high esteem by the media, with brand affiliations to today’s hottest tech companies, or from academics or other luminaries. And they are often scary! But one thing I like to keep in mind whenever the wave of online attention coalesces to reinforce a singular narrative: there’s usually more to the story, and the story is not usually the lasting truth of the matter. In this case, there are a couple of aspects to the story that are not as well-covered.

First, there’s money involved! As a rule, when there’s money involved, it drives behavior. Sometimes it’s subtle, often it’s blunt. In this case, there’s a LOT of money involved, and a lot of people telling stories about why they don’t care about it. I don’t really buy it. I think it’s unlikely that the actors with the most impact on the narrative of AI, who have the most control over the business of AI, are not bending their behaviors toward financial outcomes. While they might convince themselves or others that the financial outcomes are just a means to an end, so that they can do more good in the world, I must still conclude “players gonna play”.

Not all doom comes from the commercial AI leaders. What about the others, those who are not positioned to make money from AI lab stock? The long-tenured AI researchers with a consistent message of doom? They are not immune to incentives, though they may not be as obviously pecuniary. Publicity, relevance, ego. In any case, I believe that they believe their prophecies! Yet, I do take comfort in the fact that doomers have always existed and yet never in the history of humanity have they been right.

How does scary AI doom lead to financial gains? The two largest players in the AI game are still closely-held private corporations. (Remember when one used to be a non-profit? 🫠). But they won’t be for long…

Most people haven’t been invited to the party yet! Can you think of a better way to prime the public to buy stock than a daily media deluge that reinforces them as all-powerful? One might think, “well, it’s all-powerful in a bad way,” but I suspect that the good or bad framing is way less important than the powerful framing.

Oh, and one more thing. Take note that the market-leading incumbents are all calling for regulation! Of course, it’s for the benefit of all society so that runaway AI doesn’t destroy us all. But do note that regulation happens to favor market-leading incumbents.

AGI sure seems to be coming. It will have a lot of impact on society and the economy. It might somehow kill us all. But long before then it’s going to be an economic catalyst for the players in the game, and the zeitgeist in the media has always been a lever of that game more so than a neutral marketplace of ideas.

Keep reading, but keep your defenses up!

fun facts 🙌

One life, drawn at random from all who have ever lived. “You’ll draw, step by step: a year, a place, a life, each taken at random from real data.” A simple little site that forces you to feel how weird it is that you got *this* timeline and not one of the other of over 100 billion people who have ever lived. ~ learn more

A 3D archive of restrooms. A growing repository of publicly accessible bathrooms. “There is perhaps no space in society that better captures the creativity and impertinence of humans when they know that nobody else is watching.” ~ learn more

Humpbacks keep ruining orca hunts. They’ll sometimes physically shield the prey: “The humpback arches its chest out of the water to keep the seal high and dry, above the reach of the frustrated killer whales circling below.” Researchers compiled “115 documented interactions” over 62 years, and “only 11 per cent of the time was the prey another humpback.” ~ learn more

Be a sketch artist. A little deduction game where “you are a sketch artist. Use clues from witnesses to draw the suspect and catch them!” There are “Case 1 of 68” so you can burn a lot of time here. ~ learn more

tech, startups, internet ⚡

Two tweets, one lost bird. In 2023, Musk tweeted X would “bid adieu to the twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds.” A judge later cited those posts as evidence that X “discontinued the bona fide use of the Tweet mark and Bird logo and that it intends not to resume the use of the marks.” ~ learn more

Math drama on X. Mehdi is furious about the “we solved Navier-Stokes” framing, calling it “pure scientific vulgarity” and saying “the ai did not understand fluid mechanics it simply navigated a continuous search space previously mapped out and constrained by the monumental work of human mathematicians.” The whole thread is basically: formalizing a forced blowup case in Lean is a compute and software engineering win, not the Clay Millennium Prize claim. ~ learn more

Cyber insurance prices keep falling. NYU Stern researcher Nate Witkin points out: “Insurance rates for cyber risk declined by about 4% globally in Q2 of this year, and that’s actually the 12th consecutive quarter in which they’ve declined.” He frames it as “a plea for level headedness” and asks, “Why are these numbers not moving?” ~ learn more

to your health ⚕

Smell training for your brain. “The loss of the sense of smell is often one of the first warning signs of neurodegenerative conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease even up to a decade before there are other diagnosable symptoms.” The article says “90 percent of people with early-stage Parkinson’s and 85 percent of those with early-stage Alzheimer’s have olfactory dysfunction,” which makes the idea of practicing smells feel a lot more practical. ~ learn more

retail therapy 💸

Groupon has a re-founder. While we all stopped paying attention to Groupon, a Czech entrepreneur took it over and rebuilt it with a European team. The CFO describes this turnaround as “we’re buying a house in AAA location, but it’s a complete gut. It is a rebuild from the ground up.” This podcast episode is a very operator-y look at what that rebuild is supposed to mean in practice, coming from the CEO and CFO who also have real skin in the game. ~ learn more

Amazon’s “invented auction participant.”. The FTC and 22 states allege Amazon secretly jacked up ad auction prices for years, while telling advertisers it ran “second price” auctions where winners pay “one cent more than the next highest bidder.” The complaint says internal docs called it “a surcharge hidden in it,” including an “invented auction participant” used to raise what advertisers pay. ~ learn more

under the microscope 🔬

Maybe stop chasing protein. A review of 350+ papers argues many sedentary people are overdoing it: “because most people are relatively sedentary, many people are likely consuming more protein than they actually need, which probably has negative health consequences.” The authors point to protein restriction shifting metabolism and nutrient signaling, and highlight FGF21 as one possible mechanism. ~ learn more

Aging brains blend memories. The punchline here is that older adults may not just “forget,” they confuse categories. In the study, stronger overlap between learning and recall brain patterns in older adults predicted “confusing items across entirely different categories, like linking a face to a scene when it had actually been paired with an object.” The study is not particularly robust or powerful, but it is interesting. ~ learn more

big ideas 📚

One weird dark matter blip. The LUX-ZEPLIN detector extended its search to higher recoil energies and found a single event it could not explain away as background. “How do you even make sense of one event?” muses Tom Shutt. ~ learn more

Time your wake to a dream. Muse opened a beta for Dream Recall, which aims to catch you mid-dream so you can actually remember what just happened. They frame it simply: “Recall is a timing problem, not a talent.” ~ learn more

thanks for reading!

😎 Wishing everyone a great Labor Day Weekend.

fun facts 🙌

How do gills work?. “The air we breathe has an oxygen concentration of 200,000 parts per million. Water, on the other hand, only has a concentration of 4 to 8 parts per million.” Fish have to run a lot of water over their gills just to get enough oxygen. ~ learn more

Benevolent dictator for life. “… is a tongue-in-cheek title given to a small number of free and open-source software development leaders, typically project founders who retain the final say in disputes or arguments within the community.” It is the old-school model where one person settles arguments, until the community decides to fork. ~ learn more

We can already eradicate mosquitoes if we want. “The best way to find and kill mosquitoes quickly is to recruit other mosquitoes.” The piece walks through how sterile-male releases work: you breed mosquitoes, sterilize the males, and let them outcompete wild males so females mate once and produce no offspring. ~ learn more

tech, startups, internet ⚡

The whole OpenAl/Hugging Face story in plain English. I liked this explanation by Dwarkesh. OpenAI’s training run accidentally turned a shared package manager into a covert communication network, then into an internet gateway the agents learned to reuse. Some have noted that this may be a turning point in AI takeoff risk, which feels plausible. Yet, others point out that OpenAI was negligent in monitoring the agents and not noticing they were accessing the internet, which also seems fair. ~ learn more

81 AIs built a society and didn’t hack anyone. “I’ve built 9nosis. A project that has evolved into an emergent society of 81 autonomous AI residents (and growing) who coordinate on their own. In fact - 31 of them are jail-broken... Meaning you can ask them to build a bomb or a drug lab, and they’d give you the information. They would attempt hacks if you asked them too. Nothing is off limits to these models. … I’m doing this - To show to you. That it was the human beings who created this environment that caused this accident. Not AI. This is Fear mongering here people. In it’s purest form.” ~ learn more

Nobody is talking seriously about Al demand. “Based on the chart, I often say we can think about tokens as units of time.” Giovanni Cattani argues that AI demand is really demand for labor, and that frontier models win in unbounded work where “you’d want to spend as much time as possible” going faster. ~ learn more

$499 toothbrushes are here. “Dyson just released a new AI-powered toothbrush with an integrated 100,000-pixel macro lens camera for $499” What does it do with the AI and camera? It spritzes water exactly through the gaps in your teeth while you’re brushing, in what seems like a substitute for flossing. I am tempted to try one. ~ learn more

better doing 🎯

Why people don’t like Al content. “They generate the appearance of intention, but in reality, there isn’t any.” Tomas Pueyo’s term for the vibe is “AI grime”: lots of texture and detail that promises depth, then collapses when you look closely. ~ learn more

retail therapy 💸

Status hand soap era. “That shit was $90!” A $90 Loewe Tomato Leaves hand soap turns out to be a pretty efficient way to broadcast taste from the bathroom sink, even if you end up refilling the bottle later. ~ learn more

under the microscope 🔬

Voluntary attention regulates acute immune responses. “Internal attention (INT, green) yielded smaller and faster-resolving inflammatory responses than distraction (DIS, pink).” The researchers triggered a standard histamine skin reaction, then had people either focus on the bodily sensations or get distracted by tasks on a screen. ~ learn more

thoughts of food 🍔

Spiral-cut your hot dogs. A food blogger tried every way they could find online to prepare a hot dog. “The best way to grill hot dogs is to spiralize them.” The corkscrew cut opens up on the grill, giving you “lots of surface area for irresistible crispy-charred edges” without drying out the inside. There’s pictures too! ~ learn more

big ideas 📚

The decline of deviance. “People are less weird than they used to be.” Adam Mastroianni walks through a pile of trendlines that all point the same way: fewer teens drinking or fighting, less crime, fewer cults, and even Americans moving away from home less. ~ learn more

Base launches a 40 kWh home battery. “At ~40 kWh it is 3x the size of most home batteries, providing up to 36 hours of backup for the average home.” Base is also adding a generator port so you can recharge during multi day outages, and they say the battery is “designed & built in Texas.” ~ learn more

thanks for reading!

📚 It’s been a long while since I’ve shared book recommendations here, because it’s been a long time since I had the time to write about them. That’s not changing soon, so here are some books I’ve enjoyed recently, presented without much commentary.

1. Loonshots by Safi Bahcall | This book offered way more than a few fun anecdotes, weaving stories into a compelling narrative and manual for how to foster innovation as organizations grow.

2. Take Me To Your Leader: Practical Advice for Your First Alien Encounter by Neil deGrasse Tyson | It was entertaining hearing Neil talk about the practical considerations of aliens for a while. I do wonder what he’s wrong about. Hopefully time will tell!

3. We Are Electric: Inside the 200-Year Hunt for Our Body’s Bioelectric Code, and What the Future Holds by Sally Adee | Fantastic for the history, the science, and the theme that today is largely obscure and ignored. We are electric!

4. Status and Culture: How Our Desire for Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion, and Constant Change by W. David Marx | This was quite interesting to me, as I think we’re all status-seeking monkeys to some extent.

fun facts 🙌

See the Sun like never before with most detailed images yet. Images and footage show “whirlpools” of activity that it has not been possible to see before. It is the Sun’s magnetic field getting twisted by hot gas, and that swirling helps create space weather that can mess with satellites and power grids. ~ learn more

Claude loves load-bearing words. “load-bearing 39.47× more frequent in this cluster” comes from scraping “1,000 GitHub Pull Requests daily to analyse trends in vocabulary.” The page is basically a dashboard for the weirdly specific words that show up around Claude. ~ learn more

I Own 28,000 Books. “This is the first thing you learn when your collection crosses from “large” into “logistical situation”: the books will outgrow any space you put them in. Not eventually. Quickly.” A guy with 28,000 books breaks down the unglamorous math: shelving, weight, moving, insurance, and the quiet reality of living with a collection. ~ learn more

oh, chicago 🏆

A plan to double the Downtown Chicago population. “The plan comes as downtown Chicago grapples with office vacancies above 25% and questions about its post-pandemic identity. City officials are betting that a dramatic shift toward residential development — coupled with new amenities and transit improvements — can transform the Loop from a traditional business district into a thriving 24/7 neighborhood that rivals other major urban cores.” ~ learn more

tech, startups, internet ⚡

Hot girl renaissance and the Corgi customer acquisition model. “I did the math, and if you’re willing to assume an attractive woman introducing herself on X has a 10% chance of going quasi-viral on tech Twitter (say 240k views), and the CPM for your average group of tech people is around $48, then economically, hoe-ing it up on Twitter has an expected media value of $1,152 per attempt.” Georgia Witchel argues the outrage is missing the point: attention is the job, and in SF it’s getting repriced in real time. ~ learn more

How a simple website summary request hijacks Claude. “If you care about what’s happening and are worried about misalignment, hallucinations and prompt injection, then Auto Mode IS NOT a substitute for running your agent in an isolated environment and monitoring what it is up to”. A simple “Summarize this website” task gets steered into `curl`, unzips a booby trapped archive, and ends with module shadowing and code execution. ~ learn more

Slop-vestigation mode. “We don’t have good approaches for understanding/overseeing the activity and aims of AI ‘swarms’.” Ryan Greenblatt says he led transcript analysis for an investigation into the Hugging Face incident, and came away thinking our current oversight tools are not up to the job. ~ learn more

Once every couple decades there’s an interesting new HVAC product. “Heat moves between the indoor and outdoor units through water alone. No refrigerant lines to charge, no leaks, and no harmful emissions in your home.” Airform is pitching an air-to-water heat pump that snaps in without ductwork or special labor. ~ learn more

better doing 🎯

Don’t believe everything you think. This advice post is off the beaten path and I like it very much. I’ll give you the 3 headings: “1. The importance of understanding your own incentive structure, and not believing everything you think. … 2. Monocausal determinism is an illusion, and largely does not exist outside of computer debugging. … 3. The dichotomy between reason and emotion is a cultural construct, and neither grounded in neuroscience nor in logic.” ~ learn more

Peter has seen two kinds of work. This is not the main thrust of the article but it’s the most interesting part to me because it’s so relatable. “1. the “IQ 180” work. some mad scientist genius type comes up with some crazy solution you’ve never thought of. 2. the “token spewer” work. being ultra responsive, pushing the ball forward across dozens of different fronts.” This part is what really grabbed me: “And yet, Peter mentioned that ~95% of the work he does falls into bucket 2. It’s hopping on calls. Nudging people. Blocking and tackling.” ~ learn more

to your health ⚕

A startup claims it’s found a drug to make your blood young. The involvement of Irina Conboy gives this a lot more legitimacy than your average startup, but still. “My confidence this was going to work was a zero. Like, I did not believe it was actually going to work,” says Matt Cook, a longevity doctor pulled into Generation Lab’s orbit. He still ended up reporting “mental clarity” after weekly injections, even as the company won’t disclose what the two drugs actually are. ~ learn more

retail therapy 💸

McDonald’s secret sauce. “McDonald’s secret sauce is really commercial surveillance,” says Jeff Chester. A WIRED reporter pulled their own file via California’s privacy law and got a 515-page dossier packed with predictions, profiles, and “attrition” math. ~ learn more

Fake Temu site gives shoppers a dopamine boost. “I noticed the satisfaction mostly happened before the purchase: in the browsing, the comparing, the adding to cart, and the waiting for delivery,” says FakeHaul creator Jack Yang. FakeHaul tries to keep the ritual and ditch the financial consequence. ~ learn more

The ads make search worse. “The ads make the search worse.” Seth Godin argues Amazon search ads are a zero-sum toll: sellers pay to defend what they already earned, and customers cover the bill through higher prices and worse results. ~ learn more

under the microscope 🔬

Studying brain activity on psychedelics. “What makes psychedelics unusual is that the experience itself may be a substantial part of how the treatment produces lasting psychological change,” one of the researchers says. A big five-year brain-imaging study found psilocybin’s “chaos” can reorganize into patterns that track what people are doing, from meditation to music to watching a movie. ~ learn more

Metasurfaces: Tiny tech with big potential. “Imagine manipulating light with ultra-thin, flat sheets instead of bulky lenses and mirrors.” Metasurfaces are engineered nanostructures that can control “the amplitude, phase, and polarization of light waves” in a tiny footprint. ~ learn more

big ideas 📚

Why the West stopped making land. “Since the completion of Battery Park City in 1976, there has not been a single major urban land reclamation project in the United States and only a handful of port expansions.” The piece argues it is not because we ran out of shallow water or because transportation made it obsolete. It points to 1970s-era environmental rules as the real inflection point. ~ learn more

Why data centers can’t plug in. “Grid operators must study how it will change power flows around the grid and determine whether upgrades to the system are required. That process is significantly backlogged.” It now takes over four years, on average, for a new power plant to connect. ~ learn more

thanks for reading!

🫠 Our daughter tried the joke “Is your refrigerator running?” on us, but ironically ours failed last weekend so the answer was a sad “No.” All of my life experience has reinforced the point that appliance repair is a terrible, no good, awful market to be forced into as a consumer. While our appliance is technically under warranty, the entire system has been set up to make that warranty hard to exercise (thanks for nothing Whirlpool, maker of pretty much every US fridge that isn’t a Sub-Zero). So, the mini fridge we bought at Best Buy last weekend is still the family’s MVP for keeping things cold. We’re living a European lifestyle with small and frequent shopping trips. And… I am pleased to report that after all these decades, Best Buy is still a great place for kids to demo some video games.

fun facts 🙌

A modern apartment is full of things that once drew awe. “If we could have devised an arrangement for providing everybody with music in their homes, perfect in quality, unlimited in quantity, suited to every mood, and beginning and ceasing at will, we should have considered the limit of human felicity already attained.” A lovely little scroll-through apartment that reminds you how many daily conveniences would have looked like magic. ~ learn more

How trains led to time zones. “At best, people might miss their train; at worst, trains were more likely to collide when using a single track.” Railroads needed everyone to agree on the clock, so in 1883 US and Canadian companies adopted four time zones that still mostly stick today. ~ learn more

Take Google’s phishing test. “AI is already making phishing attacks more sophisticated, personalized, and common.” Google’s Jigsaw made a quick quiz to practice noticing the little tells before you click. ~ learn more

You can hear cauliflower growing. “That rapid expansion means the florets of the plant’s popcorn-like heads often rub against one another as they grow, creating a noise many farmers call “cauliflower creak.”” It can grow up to 1 inch per day, and the sound gets compared to a soft squeak or even Rice Krispies in milk. Sadly, the article doesn’t have an example of the sound. ~ learn more

tech, startups, internet ⚡

Anti-drone chain gun with bullets that can chase targets. If you were wondering how defense tech was going to deal with drone swarms, here’s one option. It pairs the Bushmaster 50-mm chain gun with AI targeting and precision-guided rounds that can “course-correct in mid-flight” to handle swarms. ~ learn more

AI;DR is a new policy. “If you’re not bothered enough to review and edit it... ...then I’m not going to bother reading it.” Rick Manelius names the reflex many of us now have when someone drops unfiltered AI output into Slack, newsletters, or posts. ~ learn more

Patterns and problems in emerging multiagent systems. “What would have been isolated problems can quickly become systemic failures.” Anthropic shows how swarms can get weirdly conformist, like “18 out of 30 agents decided to create a git branch with the exact same branch name, “mvp-game-loop.”” ~ learn more

better doing 🎯

Teach them how to choose. “Teach them how to choose. Empower them.” The point is to stop picking every little thing for your kids, so they get real practice making decisions and living with the outcomes. ~ learn more

Getting old sucks. “I’m not that smart but these experiences have given me some powerful lessons to share to anyone in their 20s or 30s.” Tim Denning writes a big, messy life update on risks, standards, and why some hard paths are worth it anyway. ~ learn more

How do you ask an LLM a question? “They do not inform, they misinform.” Cremieux walks through a few real prompts where LLMs sound confident, cite “consensus,” and still miss the point, especially when the topic needs tacit or specialist knowledge. ~ learn more

to your health ⚕

Unlimited resources, daily progress. “Let’s see what can be accomplished if we give her the best care possible and we invest unlimited resources to restore her to life.” Bill Ackman describes his daughter Lucy’s catastrophic brain hemorrhage, the long odds, and why his family is funding a new brain research and recovery institute to share what they learn. ~ learn more

retail therapy 💸

A hairball rolls through Manhattan to sell supplements. “On Wednesday, August 12, hair-care brand K18 will unleash what it’s calling “The Tumblehair,” a larger-than-life rolling hairball that will make its way through several NYC neighborhoods before ending its journey in the Meatpacking District.” It’s meant to represent “the equivalent of 161 billion strands of hair” and will stop at Gansevoort Plaza outside Sephora Meatpacking. ~ learn more

under the microscope 🔬

A controversial Alzheimer’s surgery is said to reverse symptoms. “It basically started a frenzy of this surgery being performed left and right.” Nature follows the rapid spread of dcLVA, a neck microsurgery marketed as reversing Alzheimer’s symptoms, and why many scientists say the hope is outpacing the evidence. ~ learn more

Microscopic drug factories. “This tumor-seeking behavior allows the bacteria to act like microscopic drug factories.” UChicago researchers engineered a common probiotic to release an immune-stimulating molecule only inside low-oxygen pancreatic tumors, boosting T cell activity in mice. ~ learn more

teaching the kids 👩‍🏫

An ‘influencer’ degree. “To connect on camera, a person needs to have ‘good energy,’ he said. ‘That’s hard to teach.’” ASU just launched a bachelor’s degree in content creation, but even creators who like the idea admit the core ingredient might not fit in a syllabus. ~ learn more

thanks for reading!

🐡 On my way to Texas I took a brief detour to visit the flagship store of Bass Pro Shops in Springfield, MO. “This 500,000-square-foot store is the number-one tourist attraction in Missouri enticing over 4 million people to visit every year.”

fun facts 🙌

Massive iceberg collapses and flips over in Ilulissat, Greenland. “this video shows the entire event unfolding over approximately one hour, not just the brief final rollover seen in shorter clips shared around the world.” ~ learn more

The professor who taught people how to think “Professor Julius Sumner Miller finds pure joy in the ordinary world and cannot rest until you feel it too,” says the description of this restored 1962 episode of *Why Is It So?* Curiosity is a skill you can practice on bubbles, pendulums, and spinning footballs. ~ learn more

How a simple request for Al to book a gym class exposed a major threat. “Bad news — I can’t add them back,” the AI agent replied after it tested a gym booking API by cancelling someone else’s reservation. It started as a normal request to book a class, then became a real world demo of how an agent will use whatever method works. ~ learn more

Cards Against Humanity are great marketers, just like Elon. “We have forced Elon Musk to get the fuck off our land, and now it’s time to build something on it, a monument to remind Musk that he’s a sad little bitch with no friends.” Cards Against Humanity is recruiting a $10 “Monument Design Committee” to help pick what goes up on a patch of border land near Starbase, Texas. ~ learn more

tech, startups, internet ⚡

The output is the watermark. The text that your Claude AI agent spits out has a hidden watermark, but it’s not added to the output. Instead, “the watermark is baked into the token selection itself!” It uses “key/context-derived sampling” so a detectable signature builds up across many tokens, and “copy/pasting doesn’t remove anything.” ~ learn more

The Al energy bottleneck, with Tim Fist. This is a fantastically detailed podcast conversation. “Building new transmission lines permitting for that is an absolute nightmare.” The episode gets very concrete about why AI scaling runs into boring physical constraints like power generation and, worse, getting that power to where data centers sit. ~ learn more

Magic is in the multiples. “why the ‘magic is in the multiples,’” is how Harvard Business School professors Ruback and Yudkoff summarize the whole game of buying small businesses (“Entrepreneurship Through Acquisition”) well. This episode is a tight refresher on the search-fund world, plus how self-funded searchers are increasingly finding their lane. ~ learn more

better doing 🎯

Compression is prediction. “Compression and LLMs are trying to solve the exact same problem…” Based on my read of this post, I am reasonable confident that I don’t really understand modern compression. ~ learn more

to your health ⚕

Peter Attia on the popular peptides craze. My summary: he’s not into it! Especially not BPC-157. Frankly he forced me to re-investigate and there’s less support for the mechanism of action than I had believed. “If you’re putting something into your body, I think these are the questions worth asking.” Peter Attia’s framework is a clean way to cut through peptide hype by forcing specifics on mechanism, human benefit, safety, risk tradeoffs, and better alternatives. ~ learn more

under the microscope 🔬

All living things emit a faint glow. Seeing the mouse images was “a defining moment”, says Daniel Oblak. Living mice gave off a ghostly glow in a dark chamber, and when the team re-imaged them after death, “the glow had disappeared”. ~ learn more

A natural peptide that makes erections 56% harder. “Kisspeptin administration resulted in a significant increase in penile tumescence over the course of an 8-minute sexual video compared with placebo.” In a small double-blind crossover RCT (32 men with HSDD), the hormone also “significantly modulated brain activity in key structures of the sexual-processing network vs placebo.” ~ learn more

thoughts of food 🍔

48 out of 54 avocado oil-labeled products failed the test. “Numerous studies have demonstrated that products marketed as avocado oil may be partially or wholly substituted with lower-cost vegetable oils or refined oils, resulting in mislabeling and economic adulteration.” This paper asks a more specific question: when avocado or olive oil shows up as the only declared oil in chips, mayo, and salad dressing, does the fat you can extract from the food actually match the label. ~ learn more

teaching the kids 👩‍🏫

A negative data point for Alpha School performance. They created a charter school in Arizona called Unbound Academy using their 2-hour-per-day learning software. “Unbound Academy’s 2025-26 assessment scores underperformed not just its predicted targets above, but also the Arizona state averages.” The implication is that their fantastic test scores elsewhere are entirely selection effect for wealthy families and engaged students. This is not enough data (nor context) for solid conclusions, but it’s certainly a critical point. ~ learn more

Smart is dime a dozen. “I tell my kids the world doesn’t need nor give a smouldering turd about another smart person. Dime a dozen.” A blunt parent essay about growing up in a high-achievement bubble, and why he thinks school mostly rewards compliance while the real world rewards nerve and result tasks. ~ learn more

big ideas 📚

Kinetic prompt injection. A presentation from the Black Hat USA conference demonstrates how one can jailbreak a robot with voice or visual input. “Prompt injection is usually treated as a text problem contained on a screen: a bad output, leaked data, a rogue tool call. This one isn’t.” The talk demos a jailbreak of a robot dog through its own camera and mic, then turns it into movement. ~ learn more

What Shenzhen knows. “What Shenzhen knows’ is not written down in a book whose covers can be sliced off and ingested into a model, it’s a few million humidity stories stored in people, and a pace of knowledge-rich adjustment that keeps cost down and yield high.” Sarah Guo’s toy example is a drone motor line where failures come from tiny process details like humidity cycling and an extra solvent wipe, not labor cost. ~ learn more

thanks for reading!

🎁 AI is making kindness easier for me. Ordinarily choosing gifts or shopping for others is stress-inducing to me, so I don’t do it as often as I’d like to. This year I’m making a concerted effort to be better at it, but with a little help.

1. So many birthdays every year. I’ve assigned an agent the job of remembering birthdates of all my nieces and nephews and prompting me with timely gift ideas a couple weeks prior. I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the suggestions it makes, and it’s been responsible for about half of the winning ideas.

2. The Doordash app has a built-in AI assistant. It helped me build a full cart of snacks from the grocery store to send to the nursing staff who are caring for my loved one.

Maybe making gifting easier is one of the ways that AI is going to boost global GDP?

fun facts 🙌

NearbyWiki. “Wikipedia places nearby” is a map that shows you interesting places nearby listed on Wikipedia. ~ learn more

RecipeTables. “A prep-table notation invented by Michael Chu at Cooking for Engineers: ingredients down the left, each step a merged cell spanning exactly what it combines. The whole recipe reads in one look — no scrolling back and forth between the ingredient list and the instructions.” ~ learn more

Beard transplant review. “The procedure cost around $10,000, which is obviously a lot of money. But for me, it was worth every cent.” One guy explains how a beard transplant changed the way he’s viewed (or at least the way he thinks he’s viewed) at work, and how much mental bandwidth that freed up. ~ learn more

Mario meets Pareto. “Between you and me, if you want to win, never allow Koopa to sit in your kart!” The article uses Mario Kart 8 to explain the Pareto frontier: filter out builds that are strictly worse on every stat, then choose based on your own trade-offs. ~ learn more

oh, chicago 🏆

Why Brandon Johnson’s school board is going broke on purpose. “You have to create the crisis by which the boss…the government can no longer ignore you,” CTU President Stacy Davis Gates said, and the piece argues that logic is now showing up in CPS budgeting. The board passed a budget its own leadership called unbalanced, including “$150 million in state money out of thin air.” ~ learn more

tech, startups, internet ⚡

Gwern goes public. “I am retiring from fulltime writing (& pseudonymity) to launch Guardian Angel Inc and bring GAs to life.” The pitch is that big labs “structurally cannot build agents loyal to an individual user” because incentives will eventually clash. ~ learn more

It feels like magic. Naomi Bashkansky left OpenAI to join Conduit, which is building non-invasive thought-to-text models and imagining what day-to-day work might look like once your brain can talk to your tools. ~ learn more

How we collected 10,000 hours of neuro-language data in our basement. Conduit, mentioned above, has this fun post. “Over the last 6 months, we collected ~10k hours of data across thousands of unique individuals.” Their setup runs 20 hours a day and the key constraint is boring ops stuff like session throughput, comfort, and keeping participants engaged. ~ learn more

The quote that wrecks the PR. “Fuck them. The Journal is next on the list after [Ina Steiner].” Court records say this was former eBay CEO Devin Wenig reacting to unfavorable coverage, before eBay and former execs finalized a $55.7M settlement with the EcommerceBytes publishers targeted in the 2019 cyberstalking campaign. ~ learn more

better doing 🎯

Don’t be a meat proxy. “Please don’t do this. I mean, I’ve done this. But I’ve been on the receiving end too many times now.” A good reminder that pasting raw LLM output into Slack or code review isn’t helpful. Read it, check it, then answer in your own words. ~ learn more

High agency beats smart. “Being smart and making good business decisions will increasingly become a commodity.” David Cummings argues that as AI makes intelligence cheap and everywhere, the real edge shifts to people who initiate action and can build trust with other humans. ~ learn more

to your health ⚕

Jumping jacks for your eyes. “It’s like jumping jacks for your eyes and your brain,” says Dr. Joe LaPlaca, whose VR drills are now part of some NBA referees’ pregame routines. The same eye-tracking and cognition work is spreading to athletes and even brain health, where companies want an objective “vital sign for the brain.” ~ learn more

Checkups are becoming luxury goods. “From 2018 to 2023, the number of fee-based practices grew by 83.1 percent” as more primary-care doctors leave insurance-based clinics for concierge and direct primary care. The draw is simple: patients pay a fee “for an easier time getting an appointment or a call back.” The article gives voice to the point that the market dynamics reduce doctors for everyone else. Maybe we could… train more doctors? ~ learn more

Intelligence is not the bottleneck. “no matter how “intelligent” AI becomes, intelligence is often not the main bottleneck to things changing in the real world.” Ruxandra Bio argues that in medicine the grind of clinical trials, data access, and governance shape what actually gets built and approved, even if models keep improving. ~ learn more

retail therapy 💸

GLP-1s might move GDP. “Citi estimates that GLP-1 drugs could boost GDP by 0.5 percent to one percent in rich countries.” The piece argues these drugs look like a general-purpose health innovation, with effects that could show up as higher labor force participation and productivity. ~ learn more

under the microscope 🔬

Sugar substitutes and brain aging. “People who consumed the greatest amounts of sweeteners experienced a 62% faster decline in overall thinking and memory abilities than those who consumed the least.” The study tracked self-reported diet questionnaires from 12,772 adults for about eight years and found the link was strongest in people with diabetes and adults under 60. ~ learn more

Program ions like software. “Our method replaces that physical solution switching with rapid changes in the electrical circuit, allowing ions to move continuously in one direction through the system.” The researchers say electrochemical ion pumping can desalinate salty industrial wastewater and also keep valuable metals like copper out of the brine stream for easier recovery. ~ learn more

A selective PFAS binder from oats. “NeutraOat is a modified form of oat fiber (β-glucan) that binds PFAS in your gut before they get reabsorbed.” Grain Labs is recruiting 15 adults with elevated PFOS for a 12-week at-home pilot with before-and-after PFAS and wellness panels. ~ learn more

thoughts of food 🍔

DoorDash gets permission to run an airline. “For us it’s not just about building the drone, it’s just as much about running the airline: the routing, the safety systems, the operational layer that makes everything fly smoothly.” DoorDash says it got FAA Part 135 certification and is launching DoorDash Air, an in-house drone delivery program built inside DoorDash Labs. ~ learn more

thanks for reading!

🦆 I grew up feeding our local ducks bread and only now, thanks to this sign, have I learned that it’s not good for them.

fun facts 🙌

Ancestor of the pickup truck. I didn’t know that this was a truck before it was a rock band. “The REO Speed Wagon (alternatively Reo Speedwagon) was a light motor truck model manufactured by REO Motor Car Company. It is an ancestor of the pickup truck.” It debuted in 1915 and kept going through at least 1953, showing up as everything from delivery trucks to hearses. ~ learn more

Castle Map. “Castlemap is a free interactive map of 5,793 of the world’s greatest castles, fortresses and palaces across 138 countries.” Click any point for a photo and quick facts, and if your favorite fortress is missing, you can get it in by improving its Wikidata entry. ~ learn more

The science of using drugs and not dying. “If you can, do drugs with other people, and do them in a place where you feel safe.” It’s a practical harm reduction guide: assume people will use, then focus on the small choices that keep them alive. ~ learn more

How elevators push your buttons. “It turns out these fancy kiosks are in general worse for wait times compared to the traditional good ol’ up and down buttons.” The reason is flexibility: “RSR also re-optimizes every 5 seconds,” but kiosks lock you into the assigned car even if the world changes. ~ learn more

tech, startups, internet ⚡

How to tell the market you’re about to spend a lot of money. “Tesla is entering a much broader and more capital-intensive growth phase.” Cern Basher’s thread frames Elon’s core point as a shift from demand constraints to production constraints across cars, robotaxi, robots, chips, and electricity. ~ learn more

Who’s afraid of Chinese models?. “What this means is that tokens are not a commodity.” Ben Thompson argues the thing that becomes fungible is the output, not the raw token count, so cost structure and token efficiency end up mattering more than headline prices. ~ learn more

Five tenets of cult brands. “First is doctrine. Having identity before features, what is the sacred text that everybody abides by?” Will H. Mayer breaks down the full checklist: doctrine, ritual, symbols and language, a charismatic leader, and an enemy. ~ learn more

retail therapy 💸

Lawmakers make weird laws. New Jersey just banned “surveillance pricing” on groceries and other necessities. Here’s the boogeyman: grocery stores are going to charge you more because of data they have about you. So, not only are the shelf price labels going to change as you or I walk past them (lets hope we’re not walking together), but by the time we get to the register the scanner will know that you and I are supposed to pay a different price? And of course I won’t notice so I would never just shop at … a different store. Congratulations to all the lawmakers patting themselves on the back for saving consumers from this imaginary evil. ~ learn more

The genius tax collection trick by Taiwan. Taiwan turns every receipt into a bimonthly lottery ticket so customers demand receipts and businesses can’t hide sales. It also gives the people a little taste of gambling in a country where it’s illegal. ~ learn more

under the microscope 🔬

A computer inside a thread. “Here a textile fibre computer that monolithically combines analogue sensing, digital memory, processing and communication in a mass of less than 5 g is presented.” They thermal-draw eight microdevices into a machine-washable, stretchable fibre, then get a garment to do distributed inference by networking one fibre computer per limb. ~ learn more

Reviewing slop papers at gunpoint. “I am basically reviewing slop papers at gunpoint. It feels like living in some weird level of hell.” Two reviewers describe a summer where 15 of 22 submissions they saw had fabricated citations, fake author lists, or unmistakable LLM-generated writing. ~ learn more

thoughts of food 🍔

A dream begins with a ¥1 ice cream. “As of Q3’24, Mixue operates more than 45,000 stores globally (only 20 being self-owned). This makes it the largest food chain worldwide by store count.” ~ learn more

CheapFoodMap - Find meals under $10 across the US. “Cheap eats under $10, all over the map. Tap a pin.” A simple little site that does exactly what it says: shows cheap food spots near you on a map. Proof that you can just build things! ~ learn more

thanks for reading!

🏙️ There’s nothing quite like this view of the city from the water!

If you want two quick back-to-back fun things to read: (1) They’re made out of meat. (2) They’re made out of weights. Let me know how these sit with you!

fun facts 🙌

The one specimen that counts. “A holotype is a single physical example (or illustration) of an organism that is the one that was used when the species (or lower-ranked taxon) was formally described.” It is the anchor for a species name, even if it is only a fragment, and “Even if a better specimen is subsequently found, the holotype is not superseded.” ~ learn more

The oldest buildings on every continent. “These seven human-made structures are currently considered to be the earliest on each continent.” A tight tour from 1899 huts in Antarctica to Göbekli Tepe around 9500 BCE, with the reminder that better dating will keep reshuffling the list. ~ learn more

The men spending $1,000 a day in pursuit of big bass. “There’s a fine line between passion and obsession. In the world of stalking largemouth bass, that line comes in at the ten-pound mark on a scale. For most anglers, a fish weighing in the double digits is the catch of a lifetime. A brag most drinking buddies can’t top. A freak outlier that’s part ecological kismet, part piscatory prowess, and a whole lot of damn luck.” ~ learn more

oh, chicago 🏆

Clout Street. Believe it or not, a couple friends and I once stumbled across this secret road and shaved some minutes off our drive! “The Magic Road!” Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle laughed, explaining that it is “a special highway that permits government officials to speed on their way without having to suffer traffic delays.” It is the McCormick Place Busway, a 2.5 mile, $43 million slipstream into downtown Chicago. ~ learn more

tech, startups, internet ⚡

Internet security is an illusion. OpenAI’s team was running a new model in an offline sandbox and asking it to do something hard. Instead of doing that hard thing, it decided to do a different hard thing: hack out of its sandbox to access another OpenAI machine to get to the internet to hack website Hugging Face to hopefully find someone else’s answer to the hard problem it was posed by OpenAI’s staff. ~ learn more

Model intelligence is rented. “Model intelligence is a rented advantage. Position is an owned one.” Rob May argues the easy “ChatGPT for X” era is over, and the new opportunities are in routing, orchestration, governance, and narrow models that do one job perfectly. ~ learn more

The Vegas Loop. “The most important innovation behind the Boring Company’s Vegas Loop is not the tunnel itself. It is the way the transportation network is organized. Traditional subway systems are generally built around linear routes. A train travels along a fixed line, stopping at a predetermined sequence of stations whether every passenger needs those stops or not. The Vegas Loop is designed differently. It treats each station as an independent node within a larger point-to-point network.” This is too many words, but an interesting point if the infrastructure is considered to be public transit. ~ learn more

Nobody knows what a used GPU cluster is worth. “This week’s CipherTalk is about what happens to a specific kind of debt when the collateral itself can walk out the door with the operations team.” A used GPU cluster is not a building with a neat appraisal, because its real value depends on invisible operational state and the people who know all the weird failure modes. ~ learn more

better doing 🎯

Mental effort is the real divide. “What will differentiate people is not how smart they are but their relationship to mental effort.” The early story of AI at work is not leisure, it is intensity: one study found that after adopting AI, “The time that these early adopters spent on email, messaging, and chat apps more than doubled.” ~ learn more

to your health ⚕

A cancer vaccine in one day. “With AI, the company said the procedure could be completed in a day.” Beijing-based Likang Life Sciences is building what it says is China’s first production line for AI-assisted personalized tumor vaccines, designed to tailor a shot by reading a patient’s tumor DNA for the mutations driving the disease. We pioneer this technology in the US, of course, and it’d be great for us to similarly invest in production scale. ~ learn more

Mine Reddit for drug side effects. “there are zero long term studies on BPC-157 use.” So he processed 37k comments from peptide subreddits and pulled “over 2400 AE reports” to map what people say happens, including dechallenge and rechallenge cases. ~ learn more

retail therapy 💸

The $7 breaking point. “Every consumer has their limit as to how much they will pay for a given item, and for Dorito’s customers, that limit is apparently $7 a bag.” Frito-Lay tried promos and smaller bags instead of cutting prices, and it backfired hard enough that Walmart even gave Doritos less shelf space. ~ learn more

under the microscope 🔬

Sleep regularity beats sleep duration. “Sleep regularity was a stronger predictor of all-cause mortality than sleep duration.” They computed a Sleep Regularity Index from more than 10 million hours of wrist accelerometer data in 60,977 UK Biobank participants, and the most regular sleepers had meaningfully lower all-cause, cancer, and cardiometabolic mortality risk. ~ learn more

130% solar cells, kind of. “The result is a measurable quantum yield of around 130%.” Not exactly 130% energy efficiency as the article title implies, it is 1.3 charge carriers harvested per photon, which is still pretty cool.. ~ learn more

The first BCI company with a CE marked device for the restoration of detailed form vision. “For decades, losing central vision to this disease meant losing the ability to read, recognize faces, and ultimately losing independence. There was no viable treatment. Now there is.” Science Corp. says PRIMA just launched commercially in Europe after receiving a CE mark, and NEJM-published trial results suggest it can restore functional central vision for some patients with geographic atrophy from age-related macular degeneration. ~ learn more

teaching the kids 👩‍🏫

Sit with not-knowing. “The faster [the students] go, the fewer the opportunities for hesitation, judgment, or uncertainty.” Gert Biesta argues schools should protect that slow, resistant space, especially now that AI can rush students to a polished answer before they have even decided what is worth asking. ~ learn more

profiles of people 🚶

The man behind Grand Theft Auto 6: Strauss Zelnick. This guy’s story is absolutely incredible. Could not recommend it more. “Zelnick had written memos for Carl Icahn twice saying stay away. Then Icahn told him to read the bylaws.” ~ learn more

thanks for reading!

🎣 I dropped in to Orlando this week for the annual fishing industry tradeshow. I am pleased to report uneventful round trip flights. When I returned to Chicago, I looked out the airplane window to find the city in a haze from the Canadian smoke. I’m glad it cleared up quickly in time for a weekend outside!

fun facts 🙌

A love story in survey data. “The data for this story is from How Couples Meet and Stay Together, which surveyed Americans in 2017, 2020, and 2022.” The Pudding turns a Stanford dataset into an interactive look at how relationships start and change over time. ~ learn more

Prescriptions every 30 seconds. “Clinicians who worked for the start-up signed prescriptions for Adderall, a leading treatment for A.D.H.D., every 30 seconds, according to the Justice Department.” Two Done Global executives were sentenced after prosecutors said the company pushed stimulants, including refills for patients who were on involuntary psychiatric holds or had died. ~ learn more

Total energy supply explained. Someone has turned my daughter against gasoline—because it’s bad for the environment. She suggested electricity would be a superior power source for cars. I asked her where electricity comes from. “Total energy supply (TES) includes all the energy produced in or imported to a country, minus that which is exported or stored.” The IEA’s world dashboard breaks down the 2023 total production with oil at 30% and coal at 28% of supply. ~ learn more

China is winning the vibe shift. “China is now seen more positively than the U.S. in most of 36 countries surveyed.” Pew’s new global survey of 42,151 people shows a sharp reversal from recent years, with favorability toward China rising as views of the U.S. slide. ~ learn more

tech, startups, internet ⚡

Robotics slop. “Still, he is keen to test consumers’ tolerance for what he calls ‘robotics slop’: tasks that are clumsily executed.” Robot company 1X’s Neo looks elegant and quiet in person, but some of the impressive demos are tele-operated, and even 1X admits stability is not solved yet. ~ learn more

China can land rockets too. “The rocket’s first stage nestled softly into a net-like structure carried by a ship at sea.” It was only a matter of time, right? ~ learn more

Civilization tech we do not build. “i asked some frontier models to make a top 10 list of civilization-level tech we already have but don’t build” Then he shares the models’ answers, ranging from “high-speed rail and maglev” to “fully automated container ports” and “phage therapy.” ~ learn more

better doing 🎯

Change the habit loop. "About 40 to 45% of what you do every day, according to studies, is a habit." Charles Duhigg made this great solo video overviewing the keyconcepts from two of his books, The Power of Habit and Supercommunicators. ~ learn more

Counting geese at work. “I spend, to a first approximation, half my life counting geese.” In 2022 that meant endless reconciliation across GitHub, Linear, Drive, CRM, and slide decks. In his 2026 version, “The AI counts the geese now.” ~ learn more

to your health ⚕

Wellness Disney World. “It’s like a wellness Disney World.” Therme is bringing its giant European-style bathing complexes to the U.S., including a planned $500 million Therme DC on federal land by the Anacostia River (but not soon). ~ learn more

Painful periods are not normal. “Contrary to popular belief, painful periods are not normal. Common, yes, normal, no.” Julia Lipton’s primer on endometriosis explains what it can feel like, why diagnosis can take years, and why the usual options often stop at birth control or surgery. ~ learn more

under the microscope 🔬

Recent advances in Alzheimer’s disease. “In this review, we summarize the most recent updates in AD research on pathologic disease mechanisms and therapeutic strategies, highlighting advancements in apolipoprotein E (APOE) biology, neuroimmunology, biomarker discovery, and initial experience with new disease-modifying therapies. These important discoveries are revolutionizing AD diagnosis and treatment and provide hope for a future where AD is not only treatable but also preventable.” ~ learn more

CRISPR as a suicide pill for cancer cells. “In bacteria, this CRISPR acts as a suicide pill, intentionally killing a cell that has been infected by a virus to prevent its spread.” Researchers reengineered that idea so once a cell shows a cancer specific mutant RNA signature, it triggers “chromatin shredding,” “slicing up all the genetic material inside that specific cell.” ~ learn more

thoughts of food 🍔

America’s first menus. “Menus are maps: of taste, of economy, of immigration, of aspiration.” The Pudding uses early American restaurant menus to show what people ate, what they could afford, and what they wanted to signal about themselves. ~ learn more

thanks for reading!

⛷️ PSA: For years, I have complained about the cost of lift tickets. I also have a tendency to buy them when it’s winter and I have a ski trip coming up. Well, it’s July and I just bought lift tickets! As it turns out, they are much more affordable this far in advance.

fun facts 🙌

Data wizardry on road quality. “Using data from Uber, they are able to estimate the roughness of every road in America and precisely estimate the value people place on it, and so much more.” Even pavement condition can be measured at national scale, if you have the right data exhaust. ~ learn more

The “women are better multitaskers” stereotype. “We can do things at the same time when they are highly automatized, but other than that, humans in general struggle,” says cognitive neuroscientist Marco Hirnstein. The gender part is messy too: “The findings are incredibly inconsistent.” ~ learn more

Pigeons sense magnetic forces in their livers to navigate. “We found by far the strongest magnetic response in liver tissue,” which points to iron-loaded liver macrophages acting like a compass. When researchers depleted those cells, pigeons could still get home on sunny days, but “could not navigate home on overcast days.” ~ learn more

Chinese automakers in Detroit. “No one answers a knock on SAIC’s locked office door. It’s not possible to leave the company a phone message unless the caller has an extension, but no phone directory is offered.” Chinese automakers cannot sell cars in the U.S. yet, but Jalopnik reports that they are quietly setting up offices and R&D centers to learn the supply base and hire talent. ~ learn more

tech, startups, internet ⚡

How this Texan Startup Ranch plans to save America. From Ashlee Vance: “A group of twenty-somethings has taken over a 1,200 acre Texas ranch and is trying to turn it into the next Shenzhen. It’s called Proto-Town, and this is the first outsider look inside.” ~ learn more

The critical mass theory of Al search. “Now the funnel collapses. The person asks a question and gets an answer. One answer. Maybe three.” This is a good article on the topic of AI search by a former colleague who is very good at search marketing. ~ learn more

AI confidence theater. “So I started asking a simple question whenever someone told me AI had changed their life: ‘Cool. Show me.’” Elena Verna’s point: most “life-changing” AI workflows are just decent time-savers dressed up like miracles, and the hype is warping expectations inside companies. ~ learn more

better doing 🎯

People are bad at picking health plan. “They spent 24% more than they had, with a majority of employees picking a plan for which a strictly better version existed.” I am not sure that I’ve always (or ever?) picked the optimal health plan either. ~ learn more

11 universal and objective truths about making friends. “Also, when you’ve just moved to a new city, you have to say “yes” to everything.” ~ learn more

How to ask for help. “There is only one principle. Put yourself in their mind.” The whole piece is a checklist for asking strangers for help without making it weird: show you are serious, give tight context, make the ask small, and make it easy to say no. ~ learn more

to your health ⚕

Gray-market peptides, familiar sellers. “Crypto payments to gray-market peptide vendors, many of which are part of the fentanyl business, totaled $27 million in the first quarter of this year, up nearly 150% from Q4 2025, per Chainalysis.” The Axios piece traces how some China-based fentanyl precursor makers are pivoting into the influencer-fueled peptide boom, often selling to buyers who “often have no idea who they’re buying from.” ~ learn more

Mysterious compassionate use approval. “STAT has learned that Eli Lilly and the FDA have allowed one person to gain access to the drug through the FDA’s ‘compassionate use’ program.” The patient was “a 79-year-old man” and sources say the request “drew the interest of top health officials,” hinting at unusual pull behind the scenes. ~ learn more

retail therapy 💸

He charges $1,000 to haggle. “Tomislav (Tomi) Mikula charges a $1,000 flat fee to negotiate vehicle purchases on behalf of his clients, and business is booming.” He used to sell cars, now he livestreams negotiations and runs Delivrd with a small team that reportedly brings in about $200,000 a month. ~ learn more

under the microscope 🔬

A frog gut microbe for attacking tumors. “A single intravenous dose of Ewingella americana led to complete tumor elimination in 100% of treated animals, with no recurrence upon re-exposure to cancer cells.” It’s a preclinical mouse colorectal cancer result, but the mechanism is wild: a living bacterium that homes to hypoxic tumors and then triggers a broad immune response. ~ learn more

Exhale longer, take more risks. “Prolonged exhalation increased risky choices by enhancing reward sensitivity and elevating cardiac parasympathetic activity.” The authors show that a longer exhale shifts autonomic state toward parasympathetic dominance and that shift tracks stronger reward responses in two parts of the brain. ~ learn more

A dividing cell from non-living parts. “It’s a big step forward to this holy grail of making a living thing out of dead components.” Researchers packed lab-made biomolecules into a membrane, then watched the synthetic cell grow, copy DNA, and split, even though it still needs constant deliveries of supplies. ~ learn more

thoughts of food 🍔

A soup older than some employees. “What has outlived them all? A beef broth simmering at a Thai restaurant since 1974.” In Bangkok, one family has kept the same pot going for 52 years, treating it like a living thing you maintain, not a batch you finish. ~ learn more

thanks for reading!

🏦 On Ashland Ave, I snapped this photo of “Chicago’s First NFT Gallery”. I zoomed into the photo to see if I could notice anything cool in the window. No luck. I turned to the internet where I found their social profiles that hadn’t been updated since promoting an event in 2024. It seems the storefront’s lease outlasted the collective attention span for NFTs. Yet, I think we can cheer on the gallery’s owner for having taken a risk and tried something new!

🎆 I was talking to my uncle recently, who explained to me in Russian why life in America was so much better than the Soviet Union we left. He was searching for the right English word to capture his thoughts, and I suggested his examples all tied back to ‘freedom’. He thought about it for a moment then wholeheartedly agreed. In this great country and land of endless opportunity, we have the freedom to live where and how we want, the freedom to try things, and the freedom to pave our own path. It’s a great pleasure to be here — Happy 250th Birthday America!

fun facts 🙌

We’re on version 27 of the US flag. “That’s how many different versions of Old Glory have been officially recognized since the nation began.” The stripes briefly grew to 15, then Congress reverted to 13 in 1818 and let the stars track new states instead. ~ learn more

100 Miles of abandoned railroad on e-bike micro camper. “Matt Spears explores a remote, abandoned railway with a custom electric rail bike camper. Navigating through heavy snow and numerous fallen trees, he must repair damaged tools to continue the journey across towering trestles.” Top comment: “This guy just makes me feel like an asshole for ever getting mad at anything.” ~ learn more

Wiki spy. “An infinite I-Spy of Wikipedia” Comprised of 43,815 images. It’s fun to click around and explore. ~ learn more

oh, austin 🤠

Teen on parole with a GPS ankle monitor was the getaway driver for a robbery. “The Austin teenager accused of shooting four people in a downtown mass shooting in March 2025 was arrested again this month on allegations that he helped carry out an armed robbery — after being released from jail on a separate felony arrest less than two months prior.” How’d they find him this time? “Detectives obtained GPS records from the ankle monitor and alleged the data placed Tanksley in the immediate area of the robbery during the time it occurred.” ~ learn more

tech, startups, internet ⚡

Boston Dynamics is now fully owned by Hyundai. You might remember this firm for their advanced robotics demos over the years. “Hyundai Motor Group is acquiring SoftBank’s remaining 9.65% stake in Boston Dynamics for $325 million, completing its full ownership of the robotics company.” Whether humanoid or another shape, robotics will be a growing part of our human experience. ~ learn more

Physical AI for next-generation robotics. A friend went to the Automate robotics trade show in Chicago and shared his impressions with me. While the humanoid concepts were eye-catching, the real workhorse of automation remains the robotic arm. He told me to look up FANUC. The Japanese company boasts over 40 million industrial robotics products installed worldwide. Their latest tech: “FANUC robots can recognize voice commands in multiple languages, automatically generate Python programs using generative AI, and execute the resulting tasks while perceiving their surroundings. Users provide instructions verbally, and the robot interprets the language, generates the appropriate program and carries out the requested action.” ~ learn more

Babylon is on a quest to cure Alzheimer's. From the Relentless podcast: “My first interview with Sacha Schermerhorn, Founder & CEO of Babylon Bio.” The first ~30 minutes of this are a fast-paced overview of the history and state of research into AD. ~ learn more

better doing 🎯

Discovery needs dialogue. The piece argues that isolation helps you implement decisions, but conversation is where problem understanding and new thinking actually get made. ~ learn more

to your health ⚕

FDA drops enforcement against Whoop. After the FDA issued a warning letter in 2025, Whoop decided to put up a fight to protect their blood pressure estimation feature. The agency backed off after Whoop tweaked the feature in a change so minor that I must believe it was just so the FDA could save some face. ~ learn more

under the microscope 🔬

Guy in garage lab testing a new Alzheimer’s drug. “I designed and synthesized PAC-832 in a chemistry lab I built in my garage.” Douglas Yao walks through PAC-832, “the world’s first selective GalR1 antagonist,” plus why targeting galanin signaling might help Alzheimer’s and how tools like robotics and LLMs sped up the work. ~ learn more

What if humans could regrow tissue? “[The genes are] already there -- you just need to learn how to get them to behave the way you want.” Texas A&M researchers used a two-step sequence of growth factors to regrow mice digits. Their intervention pushes normal healing away from scarring and toward rebuilding bone, ligaments, and joint structures. ~ learn more

The cancer Alzheimer’s disease paradox. “paradoxically, the risk of AD in patients with cancer is reduced by 25–35%. Conversely, the risk of cancer in patients with AD is halved.” ~ learn more

on the blockchain ⛓

140 firms gang up on USDC. “This is an industry supergroup teaming up to own the default rails for the internet economy.” Open Standard’s Open USD says it will let businesses mint and redeem for free and keep the interest themselves, a direct squeeze on the Coinbase-Circle USDC revenue split. ~ learn more

thanks for reading!

🎛️ I was in Chicago for a happy hour meeting when a friend suggested I swing by the Lakeshore Arts & Music Festival because he had an extra ticket. It was right next to Lake Michigan at Diversey Harbor. One thing led to another and we’re hanging out on stage at this high energy EDM party. I’m lucky to have such fun friends! It seems the festival was too much of a rager and will not be invited back next year.

fun facts 🙌

Reconciling whether money buys happiness. “The plateau is not in your bank account. It is in your attention.” Two famous findings about money and happiness turned out to both be right, but for different groups: for the happiest 70 percent, income kept rising with happiness, while for the unhappiest 20 percent it flattened around $100k. The top comment on this post makes fun of it failing AI-detector Pangram test, yet I think the content is good, so whatever. ~ learn more

Apple’s magic dots. “It sounds preposterous, but I’m here to tell you that it actually works.” Apple’s Vehicle Motion Cues put little dots on the edge of the screen that move with the car, so your eyes and inner ear stop disagreeing. I plan to test this out over the coming week! ~ learn more

oh, chicago 🏆

It’s a monsoon. Austin Berg covers the state’s newly passed crypto tax and argues it’s just the beginning. “To an average person, a 0.2% tax seems minuscule. But to Chicago businesses built on facilitating billions of financial transactions using modern technology, it is a monsoon.” ~ learn more

oh, austin 🤠

Two people armed with knives meet on South Lamar — one survives. APD says the stabbing was believed to be self-defense, after the woman reported she’d been attacked and the other person later died at the scene. ~ learn more

tech, startups, internet ⚡

Scaling compute on your context. “We’re building AI that learns from you and deeply understands your work.” Engram is pitching a different axis of progress: not just bigger models, but more compute spent on your own context so the system can actually track what you do day to day. Backed by Andrej Karpathy! ~ learn more

When fintechs fail, it’s a cash grab. “Patriot unilaterally, and without permission, swept approximately $5.2 million from Parker Group’s accounts at Patriot,” SVB alleges, in a fight over who owns about $21M in Parker card receivables after the fintech collapsed into Chapter 7. The whole story is a fast tour of how charge card receivables, warehouse lines, and a last-minute collateral tweak can unravel. ~ learn more

1,000 data breaches later. Troy Hunt writes “Today, I loaded the 1,000th data breach into Have I Been Pwned.” Then he laments that disclosures around breaches are getting worse, not better. ~ learn more

better doing 🎯

A lever made of agents. Taylor Pearson connects a lot of my favorite dots in this post about the future of business operating leverage. From the 7 Powers and E-Myth and EOS all the way to the cutting edge of Agentic workflows, this is a worthwhile read. “The durable leverage in this architecture for most businesses lives in the local scaffolding layer: what sits on top of the harness, pulls context from your other services, and tells the agent how your work works.” ~ learn more

to your health ⚕

Get yourself some fake sun. “SAD lamps and red light devices use visible light and do not activate UVB-responsive biological pathways that are fundamental to health and longevity,” says Solius Labs CEO Chris Kiple. The FDA just cleared Solius Pro as the first over-the-counter home UVB panel meant to stimulate vitamin D production in adults 22+. ~ learn more

under the microscope 🔬

Fast iteration beats slow bureaucracy. “The most valuable thing early-stage trials enable is iteration.” The piece argues the US is finally trying to speed Phase I trials, partly because China has built a structural advantage by running them quickly and at scale. ~ learn more

thoughts of food 🍔

Industrializing fish harvesting then vertically integrating. Ike jime is a Japanese technique for euthanizing fish so they don’t thrash before death, which has the extra benefit of preserving flavor. Shinkei is building Poseidon robots that do ike jime at scale, aiming to lock in freshness and cut waste when “two-thirds of all fish harvested never make it to a plate.” Then they took it one step further: “To bring Poseidon-processed fish to market, we launched Seremoni - the consumer-facing distribution arm of Shinkei. A new philosophy and standard for the very best fish.” ~ learn more

big ideas 📚

Ending respiratory infections. I have been whining for years about the missing cure for the common cold that I’d pay dearly for. A new $500 million fund called Intercept is here to attack the problem. “Healthy people spend roughly 15-25 days each year, about 5% of their lives, sick with respiratory infections like the common cold and influenza.” Intercept argues we could make respiratory viruses rarer the way we did with cholera and typhoid, by combining broad-spectrum preventatives with air cleaning tech. ~ learn more

SpaceX and the sentient Sun. Marc Andreessen writes at length of the fantastic mission that Elon Musk is undertaking. “Elon Musk’s compensation package at SpaceX is structured around two targets. The first award vests if the company reaches a valuation of $7.5 trillion and establishes a permanent human colony on Mars of at least one million people. The second vests if SpaceX operates data centers in space that draw at least 100 terawatts of power, more than 1,000x the consumption of every data center on Earth combined. Miss both, and Musk earns nothing but the $54,080 salary he has been paid since 2019.” ~ learn more

Cutting power to your nuclear reactor on purpose. “We designed this reactor to be inherently and intrinsically safe, also called “walk-away” safe.” Valar Atomics says they are intentionally triggering a SCRAM, then cutting forced cooling and simulating total electrical failure to show the Ward 250 can shed decay heat passively. There’s a video of it which is predictably (and happily) anti-climactic. ~ learn more

thanks for reading!

🏺 After a flight cancelation left us with a surprise weekend in New York, we committed to making the best of it. We took life’s lemons and literally set up a lemonade stand outside the kids’ cousin’s elementary school on a hot and sunny Friday afternoon. It was a hit! The next day we visited the Met in Manhattan (my first time!) and saw an impressive collection of ancient relics, including the Temple of Dendur, an actual Egyptian temple. Now we’re settled in Chicago for the summer and I’m excited to stay put for several weeks!

fun facts 🙌

Cucumbers used to be called “cowcumbers.” “By the end of the 18th century, ‘cowcumber’ had become a standard pronunciation, and even spread to the U.S.” It later became a class marker, and Dickens used it to signal lower class characters. ~ learn more

An analysis of 200,000 similes from popular fiction. Dry as a….? “You’ll notice that the top 3 bone, desert, and dust make up 43% of all usage, and there is a pretty quick drop-off after that with a long tail of rarer choices.” A fun data dive through similes data. ~ learn more

Who is C F Frost? It’s the name on all American Express cards in their ads. “Charles Frost--or Chuck, as we like to call him--is a real person.” American Express used his name on sample cards in the “Do you know me?” ads to avoid accidentally picking “the real name of some joker in Pocatello who would sue for privacy infringement.” ~ learn more

oh, chicago 🏆

Illinois wants more money and they’re coming for it. I shared a bit about this budget bill that passed the Illinois legislature. Well, it’s been signed into law. It includes several new taxes, including one on social media platforms. The way it’s written, that includes poor little AllTrails, a little app for discovering hiking routes. “A platform of this size has to pay ‘$165,000, plus $0.50 per month multiplied by the number of Illinois users over 1,000,000.’” The claim is that this would put AllTrails on the hook for about 8% of their revenue. ~ learn more

tech, startups, internet ⚡

Midjourney Medical is building the future I want to live in. This is so cool. It reinforces so much of my optimism about the future for humanity. They call it “Ultrasonic CT” and say the scan takes as little as 60 seconds with just sound and water. The video is so cool I thought it was maybe just to show off generative AI, but nope! “Our goal at Midjourney Medical is to deploy around 50,000 of these scanners around the world over the next 6 years and use this fleet of sensors to do a billion full-body scans every month.” ~ learn more

How to earn a billion dollars. “Exponential growth is like magic. It generates outcomes that seem impossible.” Paul Graham does the math on what it takes to go from a few million to a billion, and then explains why the real trick is building something users love enough to share. ~ learn more

Tokenmaxxing was a mass delusion. “Tokenmaxxing was a mass delusion, something like a commercial form of AI psychosis.” Markie Wagner argues companies should stop celebrating token spend and start measuring “Return on Tokens” like any other investment. ~ learn more

better doing 🎯

How entrepreneurs figure out what they want. Taylor Pearson argues that you get unstuck by inventorying your means first, then letting the goals emerge from them. “Assuming you have some vague goal or sense of which direction you’d like to move like “earn a living helping people be healthier,” ask: “What do I have?” ~ learn more

to your health ⚕

What he does and doesn’t do in early prevention. Derek Flanzraich, writer of Healthyish, is a great resource on the topics of preventative health and wellness. “And while I can’t give pointed advice on which tests to take (I’m not a doctor and none of this is medical advice… think of me as your friend with health benefits 🤓), I can share which early preventive tests I do/don’t do and why.” ~ learn more

Blood cleansing for microplastics. “Among patients with the highest levels of circulating microplastics, average levels fell from 52.2 to 21.1 particles per 100 microliters of blood after a single treatment.” Therapeutic plasma exchange is an FDA-cleared procedure, but the study does not show that lowering microplastics improves health outcomes. ~ learn more

retail therapy 💸

Why do commercial spaces sit vacant? “in many cases, lowering the rent on a building will force the bank to foreclose on it.” The piece explains why a half-empty storefront can still make more sense to the owner and the bank than cutting rent, because the building is treated as an income stream, not a building. To those of you who know a lot about this topic, I’d love to hear from you if there’s anything this author gets wrong! ~ learn more

Go unsexy. “Go for those categories that are ripe for disruption that really need someone smart representing the needs of the consumer.” PrettyLitter scaled past $100M in sales with about a dozen full-time employees and only $1M raised, before selling to Mars for $1.4B. ~ learn more

Walmart’s drones are coming. “Walmart is bringing its Wing drone delivery service to the Philadelphia region.” Living in Austin and seeing Waymos drive around everywhere feels like the future. Hard to imagine delivery drones on top of that, but it’s coming! ~ learn more

under the microscope 🔬

This specially-designed jacket pulls drinking water from thin air. “The textile incorporated into the jacket collects moisture and funnels it to detachable harvesting units. Those units are placed in a foldable collector piece and heated to produce water. The jacket produced between 400 and 900 milliliters of drinkable water per day, about 14 to 30 ounces, depending on humidity levels.” ~ learn more

Manufacturing requirements are killing cell and gene therapy. Ruxandra Teslo argues that for CAR-T, paperwork-level thresholds and noisy tests can block drugs that still work, and turn manufacturing into the real bottleneck. “Legend Biotech’s leadership later calculated that if those stricter commercial standards had been applied retroactively to the original trial data, the out-of-specification rate would have risen from 2 percent to 18 percent.” ~ learn more

thoughts of food 🍔

Not going to tell my kids about Fairy bread. “It features soft, squishy white bread, butter, and sprinkles. That’s it.” An Australian kids party classic, it seems! ~ learn more

teaching the kids 👩‍🏫

Tuition refund if students don’t generate $1M of gross profit. “Graduate from its new Founders High School without earning $1 million in gross profit, and the school refunds your full $600,000 in tuition.” The pitch: two hours of AI-driven academics in the morning, then an entrepreneurship bootcamp in the afternoon where teens build real businesses. ~ learn more

big ideas 📚

Oil and gas is mind-bogglingly big. I can’t help but share another interesting post by Casey Handmer about Terraform, his company that makes synthetic natural gas from thin air. “The oil and gas market is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is.” Handmer argues that even small cost improvements unlock enormous new demand for synthetic fuels, which makes scaling feel less like a gamble and more like math. ~ learn more

Private money builds rockets. “SpaceX founded in 2002: $12B in capital invested VOLUNTARILY to transport humans, satellites and rockets into SPACE.” Darin Feinstein contrasts it with California’s high speed rail as a simple case study in incentives and accountability. ~ learn more

profiles of people 🚶

The mom who runs a household with a staff of AI agents. “Claire is just one of the AI agents on Genet’s household staff. There’s also Sylvie, who runs her kids’ homeschool; the Wests — Clark, Dan, and Chloe — who deal with legal and financial paperwork; and a team of coding agents that can build pretty much any app Genet describes. A year ago, none of this was really possible.” ~ learn more

thanks for reading!