P.S. You Should Know... | Issue #422

🤖 AI Programming

my story 🚀

Saturday Morning Bagel 🥯 & Coffee ☕ Date

We migrated to a new tech platform at work recently, and as a consequence we are now having to rebuild several of our reporting workflows. Once again I’m learning the lesson that there’s a bridge to cross between my naive view that, “obviously this is going to just work because it’s a common use case”, and my reality that, “this doesn’t exist so I guess we have to build it.”

Well, the good news is that I can get into this kind of work because it’s like a puzzle! So, on I went… Some of the data is best/only accessible by API, and that meant we needed some scripts to capture and process the data. I learned two things long ago: 1) I can write API scripts with enough elbow grease, and 2) that there are so many technical pitfalls that I really don’t ever want to!

Well, enter Cursor, the AI-powered developer platform that’s stormed the technical world. The confluence of factors above meant that I finally had a good reason to climb the Cursor learning curve. I am so glad that I did! One of the key take-aways from this experience has been that to get the best results out of this technology I have to heavily modify my interaction style. In chat/slack/messaging I like to write in short bursts, taking for granted that my counterpart can follow along. I’m finding that to get really good results out of AI pair programmers (whether Cursor or Replit) I have to be very thorough and detailed and be thoughtful about the context I incorporate into each message. Fewer, better, messages!

Restating my learning another way: I believe that the chat box input field is a psych-out, and the best format is less of the “AOL Instant Messenger” that I learned in high school and more of the “Formal Business Memo” that I learned in my university accounting curriculum.

fun facts 🙌

Jury Now. Get a dozen answers to any multiple-choice question you can pose — in real time. I asked about tipping. Specifically this: at a counter service restaurant where a 1-person meal costs $40, is it more appropriate to tip $0 - $5, or 10-20%. If you email me your answer I’ll tell you what I learned from the crowd. ~ learn more

Anti-piracy campaign uses pirated font. “Naturally, it would be hilarious if the anti-piracy campaign actually turned out to have used this pirated font, so I went sleuthing and quickly found a PDF from the campaign site with the font embedded. So I chucked it into FontForge and yep, turns out the campaign used a pirated font the entire time!” ~ learn more

Fully driverless truck to hit Texas highway without human backup. I boldly claimed during a dinner this week that in our lifetime human drivers on roads will be illegal. I stand by that prediction. “Pittsburgh-based Aurora is expected to send its first driverless truck on the stretch of highway between Dallas and Houston in the upcoming days, Axios reported. The company is reportedly launching a completely driverless truck—meaning there will be no backup drivers in the vehicle.” ~ learn more

oh, austin 🤠

Millions of dollars in SNAP benefits stolen from Texans. “A retailer we’ve seen more than once on a transaction summary is Gourmet Market & Bagel in New York City. That’s more than 1,400 miles away from Houston. None people with accounts that have transactions for the New York City food market visited the location, they say. A quick look at the Google reviews reveals a number of people from across the country who have had their SNAP benefits stolen and used here.” ~ learn more

tech, startups, internet ⚡

On jagged AGI. “You might find yourself “feeling the AGI” as well. Or maybe not. Maybe the AI failed you, even when you gave it the exact same prompt I used. If so, you just encountered the jagged frontier. My co-authors and I coined the term “Jagged Frontier” to describe the fact that AI has surprisingly uneven abilities. An AI may succeed at a task that would challenge a human expert but fail at something incredibly mundane.” ~ learn more

Cursor agent system prompt. How do you get a dumb LLM to do your bidding? You have to write a very good system prompt! Nobody wants theirs exposed as it’s intellectual property, but it seems that they inevitably leak because LLMs are inevitably jailbroken. Here is Cursor’s system prompt from March 2025. ~ learn more

Everything wrong with Model Context Protocol. MCP is a powerful new tool for software builders. Reading this post from a security expert should make builders and users a bit more nervous about it. “In just the past few weeks, the Model Context Protocol (MCP) has rapidly grown into the de-facto standard for integrating third-party data and tools with LLM-powered chats and agents. While the internet is full of some very cool things you can do with it, there are also a lot of nuanced vulnerabilities and limitations. In this post and as an MCP-fan, I’ll enumerate some of these issues and some important considerations for the future of the standard, developers, and users.” ~ learn more

Pushing the frontiers of audio generation. The technical details explaining NotebookLM. Remember when this automatic podcast generator took the world by storm? Old news, I know (haha: October 30, 2024). Yet the technical details to its development are instructive. ~ learn more

better doing 🎯

Why 30 is not the new 20. This TED Talk is over 10 years old, which makes me wonder if we can find people who were influenced by it 10 years ago and ask how they’re doing now? “Clinical psychologist Meg Jay has a bold message for twentysomethings: Contrary to popular belief, your 20s are not a throwaway decade. In this provocative talk, Jay says that just because marriage, work and kids are happening later in life, doesn’t mean you can’t start planning now.” ~ learn more

to your health ⚕

Dartmouth therapy chatbot trial yields mental health benefits. “People diagnosed with depression experienced a 51% average reduction in symptoms, leading to clinically significant improvements in mood and overall well-being, the researchers report. Participants with generalized anxiety reported an average reduction in symptoms of 31%, with many shifting from moderate to mild anxiety, or from mild anxiety to below the clinical threshold for diagnosis.” ~ learn more

thoughts of food 🍔

The curse of the Michelin star. “Restaurants awarded the honour are more likely to close, research finds…” ~ learn more

big ideas 📚

Planetary wins $1 million XPRIZE for ocean carbon capture. “The XPRIZE Carbon Removal competition, launched in 2021, set out to tackle one of humanity’s biggest challenges: how to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and ocean at meaningful, scalable levels. … Planetary’s approach restores the ocean’s natural ability to absorb carbon dioxide by restoring seawater chemistry.” ~ learn more

The most hopeful chart in the world. Solar power is great and I’ve shared before that every year the deployment of new solar blows estimates out of the water. “But here’s the thing. This chart has what you might call an “evil twin”, a cousin that gets far less of an airing - but probably should.” That evil twin is the chart of coal demand in China, which follows a similar pattern of surprising year after year growth. ~ learn more

thanks for reading!