P.S. You Should Know... | Issue #324

The end of the pre-VR world

my story 🚀

Thanks to those of you who emailed about a potential subscriber meetup. Here’s a poll to narrow down the options a bit:

i’ve been thinking 💭

🥽 Let’s talk about Apple’s VR goggles. I’m far from an Apple fanboy. In fact I’m a steadfast Windows (and Microsoft Surface Laptop) user. In 2007, I waited in a long line to buy the very first iPhone at full price with a 2-year contract. It’s because I was convinced it’d be a game changing device. If you haven’t already seen the demo of these high-tech face warmers, it’s worth a look (find the “Watch the film” link a few scrolls down from the top). They’re calling it spatial computing, and the technology powering it is top notch. The use cases are as varied as for an iPhone. Users will suffer the consequence of looking super weird, at least for a while. But I think the demos make clear that this will be part of our future. All that said, I’m not sure I’ll be running out to buy one. I had a first generation iPad and Apple Watch, and I don’t use either platform anymore. What I am sure of is that the latest versions of each are hugely better than the first. So assuming these demos accurately represent the product, we should plan for a decade of wild changes to the screens we and our kids are absorbed by in daily life.

fun facts 🙌

How wolf became dog. Differing snouts, coats, and obedience to to humans distinguish the two species. Dogs are possibly the first domesticated animals species, and they came form some sort of wolf. But how exactly did that come about? This 2015 article in Scientific American explains what scientists know and what’s missing from the story. ~ learn more

What is one-pedal driving and how does it work? I just heard about and had to look it up. Some electric vehicles offer this: “One-pedal driving allows a driver to bring a vehicle to a full stop without using the brake pedal.” Basically using the regenerative braking, letting go of the accelerator slows the car down steadily until it stops, then applies the brake automatically. ~ learn more

oh, chicago 🏆

Chicago cop got out of 44 tickets by blaming his girlfriend. The excuse worked once, and so he kept using it. “Well, that morning, I broke up with my girlfriend and she stole my car,” Kriv, who had been ticketed for running a red light, testified in January 2021. ~ learn more

tech, startups, internet ⚡

Introducing Gorilla. This seems like it might be something. “Gorilla is a LLM that can provide the appropriate API calls. It is trained on three massive machine learning hub datasets: Torch Hub, TensorFlow Hub and HuggingFace. … Zero-shot Gorilla outperforms GPT-4, Chat-GPT and Claude. Gorilla is extremely reliable, and significantly reduces hallucination errors.” ~ learn more

Machine brains and their discontents. “As biotech businesses become more specialized, I find that it can be useful to stratify biotech platforms into two buckets: target companies and modality companies. So far, AI advances have been more valuable for modality companies than for target companies. Let’s break down why that is the case.” ~ learn more

better doing 🎯

Risk revisited again. Howard Marks, the famous investor who runs Oaktree Capital, wrote this memo about risk to his limited partners in 2015. Risk can never really be measured. “It may rain tomorrow, or it may not, but nothing that happens tomorrow will tell you what the probability of rain was as of today.” ~ learn more

Scar tissues make relationships wear out. “This is my most touchy-feely thought for the weekend. Here’s the basic idea: It’s really hard to build relationships that last for a long time. If you haven’t discovered this, you will discover this sooner or later. And it's hard both for personal relationships and for business relationships. And to me, it's pretty amazing that two people can stay married for 25 years without killing each other.” ~ learn more

Train for any argument with Harvard’s former debate coach. Bo Seo explains how to argue well in this 12 minute video. ~ learn more

to your health ⚕

Who really needs a continuous glucose monitor? This article from AARP covers the increasing adoption of this technology for wellness rather than diabetes management. It’s relatively balanced. ~ learn more

under the microscope 🔬

Researchers find a sucralose (the stuff in Splenda) metabolite damages DNA. “They found that the chemical was clastogenic; that is, it directly caused DNA strand breakages. If left unrepaired or improperly repaired by the body, damaged DNA strands can lead to cancer. And their testing showed that sucralose-6-acetate negatively affected human gut tissues.” ~ learn more

teaching the kids 👩‍🏫

Why nerds are unpopular. “I know a lot of people who were nerds in school, and they all tell the same story: there is a strong correlation between being smart and being a nerd, and an even stronger inverse correlation between being a nerd and being popular. Being smart seems to make you unpopular.” ~ learn more

on the blockchain ⛓

SEC files charges. First they filed charges against Binance, and then against Coinbase the next day. They’re miffed about the exchanges not registering with them, but also did not make any reasonable form of registration available to them. I expect plenty of expert opinions and commentary to come out over the coming weeks. Meanwhile in Brazil, the largest crypto exchange Mercado Bitcoin was licensed as a payment institution by the central bank.

thanks for reading!