P.S. You Should Know... | Issue #391
P.S. You Should Know... | Issue #391
Building with GPT
my story 🚀
🤖 It was 11:30pm on Friday and I wanted to go to bed by midnight. I was compelled to do one more thing, though. If you read last week’s newsletter you will know that I’m excited for the day LLM code-writers meet easy-to-deploy infrastructure. Several readers reached out to validate my excitement by sharing their own experience. One sent me a game he made via LLM prompt and a link where I could paste the code to play it. That inspired me to riff off his game and even make my own during the week (not sharing, it was bad). My mind was primed to apply this technology.
I watched an interview with Klarna’s CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski on Friday. They are the ones who have made news using AI to replace 700 customer service agents, as well as using homegrown AI and automation to cut out Salesforce and Workday. I was left with this feeling that I was not living close enough to the edge.
On my company’s administrative todo list, there’s been a longstanding task to collect all our contracts in one place. At 11:30pm on Friday night, I had a moment of inspiration. What if we could just email all contracts to a box and AI would automatically organize them for us? I wondered if I could build this in time to make my bedtime.
Something amazing happened. Before the stroke of midnight, I had a setup where an email alias and labeling system paired with a Google Apps script to automatically process new emails. It used an LLM to extract unstructured data from the email (contract date and counterparty) in order to update the file’s name in our shared drive. This is a powerful tool, folks!
P.S. It did not work quite as well as I had wished, and by then I had my second wind, so I accidentally spent the next 2 hours wrestling with chatGPT to refine the script to scrape text from the pdf. I’m still really excited for the future!
fun facts 🙌
Buy, borrow, die - explained. I knew games like this existed, yet I am still in shock at how this one works. “Actual “buy, borrow, die” planning is enormously complicated. If that weren't the case, the ultrawealthy wouldn’t have to pay private wealth attorneys like me upwards of $2,500 an hour for their tax, asset protection, and estate planning needs.” ~ learn more
Steve Ballmer talks through the US federal budget. “He discusses taxes, mandatory and discretionary spending, the federal deficit, as well as spending on Medicare, veterans, social security, and more. Get the data straight from the source, so that you can have the information you need ahead of the election.” ~ learn more
How humans wrestle against rivers. “They naturally move, and this can have serious consequences for humans and politics, to the point of getting presidents killed. Today, we’re going to go deeper to understand why rivers move, how humans have tried to wrangle them, and what the future of rivers holds.” ~ learn more
Card Against Humanity sues Elon Musk for $15 million. “We have terrible news. Seven years ago, 150,000 people paid us $15 to protect a pristine parcel of land on the US-Mexico border from racist billionaire Donald Trump's very stupid wall. Unfortunately, an even richer, more racist billionaire⸺Elon Musk⸺snuck up on us from behind and completely fucked that land with gravel, tractors, and space garbage.” ~ learn more
oh, chicago 🏆
Chicago's food halls have entered a new era. “Chicago’s food halls were not built to be busy only three days a week during lunchtime. With Loop office occupancy rates still sagging from the pandemic, the businesses once predicated on vast numbers of customers are being forced to forge a new business model. New operators have taken over many of Chicago’s established food halls in recent months. They are working to get more customers in beyond lunchtime, and — this is key — striking deals with landlords that share the capital risk.” ~ learn more
tech, startups, internet ⚡
Interview with Klarna’s CEO. As I wrote above, Sebastian’s company has made news this year (a PR effort on their part?) with their AI applications. They do seem to really be on the forefront. He shares details, though is admittedly cagey when it come to areas he deems competitively sensitive. I think worth watching for operators who believe in AI tech. ~ learn more
Andy Dunn’s on a mission to defeat social isolation. “Our social app has a singular goal in mind: make it easy to make friends. Our aim is to place you into group settings where there is a high density of the kinds of people you might click with. Our vision is for a world where doing things you enjoy with people you like should be as easy as calling an Uber.” ~ learn more
The insurance claim game. “The sad reality of healthcare today is it’s a battle between providers, insurance companies, and patients to figure out how much care will cost. Today we’re going to shed some light on the inner workings with a short primer on insurance claims processing (exciting!).” ~ learn more
better doing 🎯
Ignoring the wisdom of crowds. “The experiment was made famous in 1987 by Jack Treynor. In his case it was 850 jelly beans and 56 students. The group average was only 2.5% off the correct number; only one student guessed better. The study has been repeated many times with similar results.” ~ learn more
Banana equivalents. “Bananas are (slightly) radioactive. The banana equivalent dose (BED) is a measurement of radiation. It’s definitely not enough to hurt you.” ~ learn more
retail therapy 💸
Hard drugs illegal again in Oregon as first-in-nation experiment ends. “Sunday marks the end of an experiment that drug-reform advocates called a pioneering and progressive measure to better help people. Oregon legislators reassessed Measure 110 this year and decided to again make it a misdemeanor to possess a minor amount of drugs — essentially anything besides marijuana.” ~ learn more
under the microscope 🔬
Immune cell injection significantly boosts healing of bone, muscle & skin. “Injecting regulatory T cells or Tregs, which control the body’s immune responses, directly into damaged bone, muscle and skin significantly boosts healing, according to new research. The door is now open to developing a universal cell-based method of enhancing healing after an injury.” ~ learn more
Superhuman performance on a variety of different scientific literature search tasks. “One approach to that problem is to identify contradictions between published scientific papers, which can point the way to new discoveries. In our paper, we describe how ContraCrow, an agent built on top of PaperQA2, can evaluate every claim in a scientific paper to identify any other papers in the literature that disagree with it.” ~ learn more
thoughts of food 🍔
Food deserts are not real? A point of view certain to be controversial in some circles. “These sorts of findings are commonplace in the empirical food desert literature: objectively increasing availability and access to food doesn’t seem to do much to what people choose to eat or what food is considered available. To understand why, we need to look at some other results.” ~ learn more
teaching the kids 👩🏫
How America’s universities became debt factories. “Here’s a puzzle: how do you create a trillion-dollar debt bubble that can’t be popped? Answer: make student loans non-dischargeable in bankruptcy.” ~ learn more
big ideas 📚
It’s embarrassing to be a stay-at-home mom. “Fertility is collapsing worldwide. We lack a coherent theory for why this is happening.” … “I propose that there is, in fact, an under-appreciated fundamental cause of these trends, which manifests in the form of different proximate causes (real and imagined) across different geographies and times. This fundamental cause is status.” ~ learn more
on the blockchain ⛓
SEC’s next target: OpenSea. If NFTs are securities, then maybe OpenSea is an unregistered securities exchange. “Non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace OpenSea received a notice from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that it intends to pursue an enforcement action, the company disclosed on Wednesday.” ~ learn more