my story š
š» Mac test drive update. Iāve decided to keep it! For those who are curious, Iāll share a bit of my experience here. The app I was most excited for was iMessage, and that alone made it worthwhile. Also, and this feels weird to say, the switch has made the computer fun again. I still canāt quite figure out why or how. Maybe I had stopped exploring and trying new things on my PC after so many years.
Itās not all roses and sunshine. Iām still fighting an uphill battle to reset my keyboard shortcut habits, especially in Excel. Window management is relatively clunky. I also experienced a fluke memory leak bug that left my geekiest friends and the apple store folks scratching their heads, but only once. On balance, Iām still glad to make the switch.
I want to thank those of you who took the time to share your app suggestions. Raycast (a supercharged command prompt) and Cleanshot (a supercharged screenshot tool) are two standouts that I now use constantly. I also switched from Chrome to Arc Browser, driven away by the bad UX of multiple profiles in Chrome. Once I committed to Arc, I began to embrace it because of how slick many of its features are. Also, huge thanks to the friend who took the time to screenshare with me and insisted on certain configuration pointers (e.g. auto-hide doc and snap it to the side instead of the bottom) to get the most out of my machine.
fun facts š
A houseplant genetically modified to glow in the dark. āDiscover the allure of the Firefly Petunia. A beautiful plant by day, it unveils mesmerizing luminescence after dusk.ā ~ learn more
A real life Weekend at Bernieās. āPolice in Brazil have detained a woman suspected of wheeling a dead man, who she said was her uncle, to a bank to withdraw a four-figure loan.ā ~ learn more
Fit over 40. āI found a guy who goes around Miami asking insanely fit people over 40: ā¢ What they eat ā¢ What workouts they do ā¢ What supplements they take. Here are my top 8ā ~ learn more
Thereās no such thing as a tree (phylogenetically). āSo youāve heard about how fish arenāt a monophyletic group? Youāve heard about carcinization, the process by which ocean arthropods convergently evolve into crabs? You say you get it now? Sit down. Sit down. Shut up. Listen. You donāt know nothing yet. āTreesā are not a coherent phylogenetic category. On the evolutionary tree of plants, trees are regularly interspersed with things that are absolutely, 100% not trees.ā ~ learn more
oh, austin š¤
No tax financing for waterfront development in Austin. Although the vision for the development looks super cool to me, this seems like the right call. āA Travis County District judge has ordered the City of Austin to scrap a plan to divert a portion of property taxes from general city services and use it to fund infrastructure projects ā such as roads, sidewalks and affordable housing ā along the south shores of Lady Bird Lake.ā ~ learn more
tech, startups, internet ā”
Mark Zuckerberg interview where he comes off quite likable. With podcast host Dwarkesh Patel, he discusses Llama 3 (and 4) and the how regulations around energy production could become the rate-limiter for AI because data centers are power hungry. ~ learn more
Malloy, modern open source language for analyzing, transforming, and modeling data. If you have spent anywhere close to as many hours writing SQL code as me, youāll probably love it as much as I did. The first 7 minutes set the stage for how SQL can be so cumbersome. Then, Lloyd Tabb introduces Malloy. ~ learn more
Compounding until inflection. A tale of two startup biotechs strategies. āAll value comes from clinical products. But itās only possible to build a generational biotech company with a foundational technology platform capable of developing multiple products.ā ~ learn more
AI-enabled services are opening a whole new market. āCompared to software businesses, services performed by humans tend to be low margin, hard to scale exponentially, lumpy in revenue, etc. etc. There are many cautionary tales. But change is afootā¦ hastened by AI, cracking open new, huge opportunities for founders brave enough to go against the tired wisdom.ā ~ learn more
better doing šÆ
How to speak more confidently and persuasively. This is an interesting interview with Matt Abrahams, who teaches a class on strategic communication at Stanford. I liked this framework because itās easy to remember: āWhat? So What? Now What?ā ~ learn more
A word to the resourceful. One of Paul Grahamās essays from 2012: āA year ago I noticed a pattern in the least successful startups we'd funded: they all seemed hard to talk to. It felt as if there was some kind of wall between us. I could never quite tell if they understood what I was saying.ā ~ learn more
Lindleyās paradox. On null effects in science. āWhat's more convincing? p = 0.04 in a sample of 10 or p = 0.04 in a sample of 1,000,000?ā ~ learn more
to your health ā
How Veradigm (fka Allscripts) is making a huge bet on AI. āNow interim CEO Yin Ho has an audacious plan to use the $140 million acquisition of AI startup ScienceIO to tap into its one major competitive advantage over giants like Epic: data.ā ~ learn more
under the microscope š¬
Data is not available upon request. Oh, my! āAmong articles stating that data was available upon request, only 17% shared data upon request. The presence of Data Availability Statements was not associated with higher rates of data sharing(p= .55), indicating a lack of adherence to journals' policies.ā ~ learn more
Things could be better. Science does not have to be written with dry language and locked away behind inaccessible journals. Adam Mastroianni proves the point by publishing the results of eight studies he conducted. āIt goes like this: when people imagine how things could be different, they almost always imagine how things could be better.ā ~ learn more
A critical take on Lantern Bioās cavity-defying microbes. In January of 2024 I shared a post about Lantern Bio, whoās āproduct is a genetically modified bacterium which infects your mouth, outcompetes all the tooth-decay-causing bacteria, and doesnāt cause tooth decay itselfā. This data scientist makes the valid point that itās a little sketchy for folks to talk about this therapy as if it works before any human clinical trial evidence exists. Because, well, lots of things that should work end up failing in trials. ~ learn more
big ideas š
Bill Gurley speaks from the heart on regulatory capture. He shares the story of his Washington DC lawyer advising him to get some friends in a room together for a visit from a congressman. He was early in his investing career and the startup he had backed needed support! ~ learn more
profiles of people š¶
Rags-to-riches of the century: Francis Ngannou. āHis story even starts like a folk tale. Poor even by the standards of his native Cameroon, Francis lived with his grandmother in a one-room, brick-and-dirt house in the village of BatiĆ©. From the age of 10, he worked in a local sand mine to supplement their meager income, but still often missed school because of lack of tuition, or was thrown out for being without a notebook and pen.ā ~ learn more
One of us! One of us! Haha just kidding, but glad to hear the MacBook is working for you!