P.S. You Should Know... | Issue #393

Can't get away from all this AI

my story 🚀

🤖 I was tasked with fixing the Sonos speaker system at a friend’s house. A single flashing diagnostic light is a disaster for colorblind folk (like yours truly). Was it flashing red, yellow, green, orange or red? I had no idea! Each color means something different. The situation really turned around for me when I realized that I could just send a picture of the light to ChatGPT and ask it the color. In the past, I would have asked Kim for help, but now AI has taken that job away!

fun facts 🙌

Octopuses hunt with fish and punch those that don’t cooperate. “Octopuses have often been thought to prowl the seafloor solo using camouflage. But a new study suggests that some have surprisingly rich social lives.” ~ learn more

Zuckerberg Augustus: Meta’s emperor rebrands in new clothes. “With a trio of bold shirts worn in recent appearances, he’s communicating that he came, he saw, he conquered and he will win again at any cost.” This is published in the Guardian who has an official position of disliking “billionaires” so you can guess their underlying message. Most importantly you can learn about Zuck’s new shirts! ~ learn more

Where did Times New Roman come from? “You might be surprised to learn that Times New Roman began as a challenge, when esteemed type designer Stanley Morison criticized London’s newspaper The Times for being out-of-touch with modern typographical trends. So The Times asked him to create something better.” ~ learn more

Amazing Africa. Most of these 25 photos and videos are really really cool. ~ learn more

tech, startups, internet ⚡

Note: it’s not lost on me that the entire section has been taken over by AI stuff. I am not sure how I feel about it, but here we are…

Text input summary: A woman DJ spins records on a rooftop in LA. She is wearing a pink jacket and giant headphones. There is a cheetah next to the woman. The background is a cityscape.

Meta movie gen. Meta’s new paper demonstrates an absolutely incredible technology. It blows OpenAI’s Sora out of the water (IMO). Watch all the 11 second clips from their paper here. ~ learn more

Smart glasses identify strangers and send dossier to your phone. It was only a matter of time… “The AI Glasses That Reveal Anyone’s Personal Details—Home Address, Name, Phone Number, and More—Just from Looking at Them” ~ learn more and more

The intelligence age. A blog post by Sam Altman. “In the next couple of decades, we will be able to do things that would have seemed like magic to our grandparents. This phenomenon is not new, but it will be newly accelerated. People have become dramatically more capable over time; we can already accomplish things now that our predecessors would have believed to be impossible.” ~ learn more

Reid Hoffman stages a weirdly interesting AI conversation. “I’ve created a new Reid AI—20 years younger—to pitch the real, present-day me on the 2004 LinkedIn plan. … To create Reid AI 2004, my team had to get creative. It’s a custom GPT trained on knowledge up to 2004, including my own writing. Using Hedra, UNSHUT, and other tools, we relied largely on an image-to-video process that doesn’t require any training video but can generate video from AI-generated images.” ~ learn more

better doing 🎯

Managing life’s 8-10 year cycle. “Roughly, every eight to ten years, life seems to cycle through like a brush fire to clean up the excesses of the past decade.” ~ learn more

retail therapy 💸

Inside Domino’s quest to revive sales with ‘emergency pizza’. “Emergency Pizza, which launched in October 2023 and ran until last February, powered a surge in orders and brought millions of new members to the Domino’s loyalty program, according to the company and franchisees. The deal was one of the biggest giveaways in Domino’s 63-year history and cost millions of dollars.” ~ learn more

Intern, manager, retired, CEO: Meet Nike’s new boss. “Elliott Hill started his career at Nike as an intern in 1988 and took on 19 different roles in the organization before retiring in 2020. Now, he's back as chief executive.” ~ learn more

The internet is insecure. “Thousands of online stores running Adobe Commerce and Magento software have been hacked starting this summer and infected with digital payment skimmers.” ~ learn more

under the microscope 🔬

Bacteria are talking. “When bacteria infect a host, they don't attack right away. They use their communication and counting abilities and wait until they are abundant enough to launch an attack that's likely to succeed.” They practice ‘quorum sensing’ and therefore it’s possible that ‘quorum-quenching’ can interrupt their pending attacks. ~ learn more

Should you be able to experiment on your own cancer? “A researcher in virology and immunotherapy got bad news: Her cancer was back with a vengeance; the treatments weren’t working. It was growing and spreading. Traditional options wouldn’t work for her. … She prepared a couple of viruses that she thought might kill her cancer, and she injected them into herself. The cancer started shrinking.” ~ learn more

teaching the kids 👩‍🏫

Meta-analysis: social media and adolescent mental health. “There is no evidence that time spent on social media is correlated with adolescent mental health problems.” I am blissfully ignorant on this issue but will eventually have to form an opinion as my kids grow up. ~ learn more

big ideas 📚

Will US cities stop adding fluoride to drinking water? “For decades, drinking water fluoridation opponents were often portrayed as a fringe element and conspiracy theorists, but a federal ruling in the US may put an end to the practice and marks a pivotal point in their campaign to convince the public and policymakers of the substance’s dangers for infants’ developing brains.” ~ learn more

on the blockchain ⛓

Satoshi Nakamoto speculation. A new HBO documentary is threatening a big reveal on October 8th. "So we figured, what better way to spend a Friday afternoon than to dig through some of the common clues that people point to when arguing that each of these people are Satoshi.” ~ learn more

thanks for reading!