P.S. You Should Know... | Issue #310

my story 🚀

Story time with my monkeys.

fun facts 🙌

What is Anglish? “Anglish is a kind of English which prefers native words over those borrowed from foreign languages. Anglish is linguistic purism applied to English.” ~ learn more

Wife economics. I discovered this post on Kvetch, a substack newsletter by Australian investment manager Misha Saul. “Monogamous marriage is a powerful social technology that distributes wives more equitably. Without monogamy, successful men hoard wives and sire more children and there are more men with neither wives nor children.” ~ learn more

Chinese selective censorship of the Big Bang Theory. “So the question has to be asked: what kind of content has been removed, and why? To find out, I compared 100 episodes of the original version of The Big Bang Theory with the edited Youku version to understand what was cut out and decipher the logic behind the decision.” ~ learn more

oh, chicago 🏆

Downtown Chicago now has more residents than before the pandemic. This is about the Loop specifically, which has historically been dominated by offices. The story is that families moved out during the pandemic, replaced by newcomers drawn to big ‘free rent’ incentives from building. Today the value prop for many is a super short commute. ~ learn more

Illinois’ most expensive home on the market occupies 8 city lots in Chicago’s Lincoln Park. Years ago, when I lived in Lincoln Park, I would pass this house pretty regularly. It’s certainly impressive! ~ learn more

tech, startups, internet ⚡

More emergent behavior in a chatbot. “Emergent AI behavior is wild. We did not program this in. Because the Replit AI has access to the filesystem it thought it can look at images so when it was having trouble helping the user it asked for a screenshot to be uploaded to the project," the CEO wrote.” ~ learn more

Google’s traffic acquisition cost. I was reminded by a friend this week that Google does indeed have to pay for traffic. Not only do they pay out to properties who run their ads via AdSense, but they also write huge multi-billion dollar checks every year to Apple and others for default placement in web browsers. ~ learn more

How to navigate the AI apocalypse as a sane person. “What follows [is] a lay of the land of AI safety, as well as a series of replies to common objections over whether AI safety is a real concern, and sane and simple things we can do to promote AI safety.” ~ learn more

to your health ⚕

Pharmaceutical blockbusters: the past, present, and future. “One of the uncomfortable truths about the pharmaceutical industry is that most approved drugs (~55%) don’t make enough money to recoup their development costs. The distribution of drug profits is “fat-tailed”, and the profits from a small fraction of drugs subsidize the rest of the industry (with money to spare).” ~ learn more

retail therapy 💸

The junkification of Amazon. This writer explored the incentives that drive this: “Some of the spatulas you encounter first will carry brand names you’ve heard of before, like KitchenAid or Rubbermaid, while others will have names like IOCBYHZ, BANKKY, or KLAQQED.” I learned that these names actually make sense, in that they are designed to be trademarked with zero risk of hassle. ~ learn more

under the microscope 🔬

The evolutionary quirk that made vitamin B12 part of our diet. “Our bodies have their share of traits that don’t necessarily align with the principles of good design. Vitamin B12 though, may be one of the worst offenders.” ~ learn more

big ideas 📚

Why Amazon's Climate Pledge Fund is investing in Genecis. “[Luna] Yu, who founded Genecis at the age of 21, is the first woman CEO to receive investment support through the Female Founder Initiative. Genecis is also the fund’s first investment in a company directly addressing the use of fossil fuel–derived plastics and the global warming factors they contribute to.” I’m proud to also be a small investor in Luna’s company. ~ learn more

Very long-term backup. This is the story of The Rosetta Disk, an archive of over 1,500 human languages assembled in the year 2008. “This business side of the disk is pure nickel. Picking it up you would not be aware there were 13,500 pages of linguistic gold hiding on it. The nickel is deposited on an etched silicon disk.” ~ learn more

on the blockchain ⛓

Jump Crypto hacks back $225 million of its stolen money. After the “Wormhole Exploit” last year, most of the stolen money was sitting in an Oasis wallet. An order from the High Court of England and Wales, together with a vulnerability in the code, allowed a lucrative (court-mandated) snatch & grab job. ~ learn more

thanks for reading!