P.S. You Should Know... | Issue #372
Happy mother's day!
my story 🚀
🌷 Happy mothers day to my mom, my wife, my mother-in-law, and all the other amazing mamas out there!
fun facts 🙌
My face blind life. Allison Sinclair has an extreme clinical level of prosopagnosia, face blindness. “Why, just this week I found out that the friendly strawberry blonde woman at work is not one person but two. No wonder our ongoing conversations get confusing!” ~ learn more
Renaissance Technologies makes a lot of money. Founder Jim Simons passed away this week, shortly after I finished listening to Acquired’s 3-hour review of the impressive investment firm he built. “RenTec’s alchemic colossus has posted annual returns in the firm’s flagship Medallion Fund of 68% gross and 40% net over the past 34 years, while never once losing money.” ~ learn more
How Einstein lost the battle to explain quantum reality. This is a fun story about science and scientists. It ends with an interesting quote from science historian John Heilbron: “The myth you slay today may contain a truth you need tomorrow.” ~ learn more
oh, austin 🤠
Lights out Texas. A short video promoting dark skies to help bird migrations go smoothly. Billions of birds fly over Texas over the course of a several weeks. ~ learn more
tech, startups, internet ⚡
Jensen Huang wishes you adversity, for your own benefit. For that juicy bit, start at 35:30. The other part of this video that stood out to me was his description of the hardware that they sell. Specifically the point that to call it a “chip” misleads by association, because their “chip” is in fact a 70lbs machine consisting of 35,000 parts and selling for $250,000 each. ~ learn more
Fred Wilson reminds readers that he’s only publishing on-chain from now on. He was an early investor in Twitter and Tumblr, and always seems to be a bit ahead of the rest of us on digital publishing innovation. He migrated his long-running personal blog to the blockchain and isn’t looking back. ~ learn more
Wisdom of the silicon crowds. Human forecasting accuracy gets much better when aggregating predictions from a lot of individuals. LLMs are especially bad forecasters compared to these human crowds. But what about crowds of LLMs? “Our finding opens the door for simple, practically applicable steps like forecast aggregation to increase current AI models’ forecasting ability—to predict future events in politics, economics, technology, and other real-world subjects—to a level on par with the human crowd.” ~ learn more
The geopolitics of AI: May 2024. “This sequence of events illustrates how the AI arms race is making geopolitical divides simultaneously more fraught and simpler. In its quest to defend US companies’ IP and prevent China from accessing the most advanced capabilities, the US government is gradually losing its tolerance for ambiguous partnership: you’re either with us or against us.” ~ learn more
to your health ⚕
When co-pays kill. “Medicare’s prescription drug benefit as-if-randomly assigns 65-year-olds a drug budget as a function of their birth month, beyond which out-of-pocket costs suddenly increase. Those facing smaller budgets consume fewer drugs and die more: 0.0164 percentage points per month (13.9%) for each $100 per month budget decrease (24.4%).” ~ learn more and original paper
Interview with Whoop’s head of performance science. Kristen Holmes is in an enviable position for many health researchers, given the large proprietary dataset she has access to. In addition to the data streams from millions of fitness trackers, the company has a pile date-stamped and labeled event and action data from its users. She previews many insights that her team is in the process of publishing in this interview. ~ learn more
under the microscope 🔬
Brain scans can now see your mental imagery. Who’s ready for this future? “Our proposed framework successfully reconstructed both seen images (i.e., those observed by the human eye) and imagined images from brain activity. Quantitative evaluation showed that our framework could identify seen and imagined images highly accurately compared to the chance accuracy (seen: 90.7%, imagery: 75.6%, chance accuracy: 50.0%).” ~ learn more
How well does semaglutide work to improve quality of live? Much better than a placebo, says this study of over 4,000 participants. It measured changes to “weight-related quality of life (WRQOL) and health-related quality of life (HRQOL)” scores. What I found interesting was that even with the drug, only 40-50% of participants had improvements that reached “meaningful within-person change (MWPC) thresholds.” ~ learn more
big ideas 📚
What does physics have to say about AI risk? “In this essay, we consider whether some very special computers will become black holes before they become gods.” ~ learn more
Decarbonization partners. There’s big money going into things that could lower carbon. Here’s the launch of a $1.4 billion new fund. “The fund, Decarbonization Partners Fund I, has already invested in seven companies including low-carbon hydrogen firm Monolith, biotechnology firm MycoWorks and electric battery material firm Group14.” ~ learn more
Sometimes governments just make extra carbon credits. There is this weird case of carbon accounting. “Shell sold to Canada’s largest oil sands companies millions of carbon credits tied to CO₂ removal that never took place, raising new doubts about a technology seen as crucial to mitigating greenhouse gas emissions.” Matt Levine explains. ~ learn more
on the blockchain ⛓
RFK Jr. wants to put the entire US budget on a blockchain. No need to take this candidate seriously, yet the idea of a truly transparant government budget sounds lovely. “During a Michigan rally on April 21, he proposed the idea and said the move would allow every American to look at “every budget item anytime they want, 24 hours a day.” ~ learn more