P.S. You Should Know... | Issue #370

Puzzling

my story 🚀

🧩 We’ve had a good run of puzzles this week. I find it interesting to note that we have two completely different approaches to puzzles and they both work. I think I couldn’t do it her way (just find pieces from the pile that match), and she couldn’t do it my way (find all the edge pieces first), so we make a great team!

fun facts 🙌

Dorking. A brief guide to dorking, the use of search engines to find very specific data. ~ learn more

Yuma wheat is a staple of Italian pasta. Arizona has a point of pride here! “The majority of Yuma wheat is exported to Italy because of Yuma’s climate and the variety we have to offer.” ~ learn more

A very short history of the F-word. “Today, the F-word is enjoying a renaissance the likes of which it hasn’t seen since, well, the Renaissance.” ~ learn more

tech, startups, internet ⚡

Foxtrot’s gone. The Chicago-based, VC-backed local grocery market and cafe that I have been a big fan of for several years suddenly closed the doors on all their stores this week. I lived very near to one in Wicker Park, and when I moved to Austin they opened another a couple blocks from me. It had quickly become a neighborhood hotspot. ~ learn more

Say goodbye to Atlas, hello to New Atlas. The incredible hydraulic dancing robot, the one that we’ve grown to love and fear, is retired. It’s makers posted a goodbye bloopers reel. Boston Dynamics would like to introduce us to the new all-electric Atlas by way of an kinda terrifying video. ~ learn more

Benedict Evans is still looking for AI use-cases. He has a great example of a research and charting task that he wanted to assign to AI, but couldn’t for reasons he explains. It voiced a lot of my personal frustrations with LLMs at the moment. “We’ve had ChatGPT for 18 months, but what’s it for? What are the use-cases? Why isn’t it useful for everyone, right now?” ~ learn more

better doing 🎯

Learn by copy. Jason Cohen celebrates copying styles. The analogy extends to business. “In America we’re trained that all copying is bad; of course plagiarism is, but perhaps we’re throwing the baby out with the bathwater.” ~ learn more

A study found diversity did not make teams work better. This is certainly a surprising result, given it flies in the face of what seems like ‘common knowledge’ these days. “A new, comprehensive preregistered meta-analysis found that, whether the diversity was demographic, cognitive, or occupational, its relationship with performance was near-zero.” It is a pre-print, and it’s well outside my personal skillset to judge its quality. ~ learn more and original study

Ask vs guess culture. “When unreasonable requests are followed up with "but you could have just said no!" Exploring the clashes of ask culture and guess culture, at home and at work.” ~ learn more

retail therapy 💸

How China took over the world’s online shopping carts. “Chinese e-commerce platforms like Shein, Temu, and TikTok Shop are going global with big ambitions.” ~ learn more

What’s the better business model for brands — DTC or retail? “I looked at publicly available finances of (4) types of consumer branded companies to get an idea their business models and who is actually making money: CPG houses — P&G, Unilever, Nestle, L’Oreal; Softgoods houses — Luxxotica, VF Corp, LVMH; Softgoods single brands — Lululemon, YETI, LEVIs=; DTC softgood single brands — FIGs, Warby Parker, Allbirds, Gymshark” ~ learn more

under the microscope 🔬

How gut bacteria connect to Parkinson’s disease. “Growing evidence suggests a link between the debilitating neurological illness and the microbes that live in our intestines. The vagus nerve may be a pathway.” ~ learn more

big ideas 📚

The extreme shortage of high IQ workers. An interesting way to think about the distribution of talent. “It’s very difficult to run a high-IQ civilization of 330 million on just 100,000 high-IQ workers–the pyramid of ability extends only so far.” ~ learn more

on the blockchain ⛓

Chris Dixon talks about the next era of the internet. He’s recently published a book called Read Write Own that makes the case for blockchains well beyond the casino effects that get the most attention. It almost feels like he’s trying to really influencer regulators most of all. This interview was quite good. ~ learn more

profiles of people 🚶

The people who ruined the internet. A reporter for The Verge spends time with the SEO operators who have long worked at squeezing money out of the internet. “I came to understand that, since the dawn of the internet, there have been people attempting to manipulate search and then people decrying those manipulations as the end of search’s ability to be useful. It works in cycles. People doing SEO find loopholes in the algorithm; critics complain about search results; search engines innovate and close the loopholes. Rinse, repeat.” ~ learn more

thanks for reading!