P.S. You Should Know... | Issue #424

Happy Mother's Day!

my story 🚀

💐 Happy Mother’s Day to all the mamas out there! Thank you for perpetuating the human species. And a special shout out to the amazing mamas in my lineage: my wife Kim, my mom Irina, and my babushka Dora!

🤧 Seasonal allergy surprise. I’ve been wearing a WHOOP fitness tracker for a while. A few years ago they released a slick ‘journal’ feature to log daily behaviors. This creates a useful dataset for analyzing correlations. If you log “yes/no” on any item for enough days, the app tell you how it impacts your recovery score. One curious and sustained finding is that my seasonal allergy days are associated with higher recovery scores. In the past 90 days it’s a huge 8% variance. The app says that this is different from other users, who on average are ~0%. I asked ChatGPT why this might be, and it proposed doing deep research on the topic (first time it was proactive about that — it was cool). “Below, we explore possible explanations, including physiological mechanisms (hormesis and immune response), environmental/circadian factors, wearable data insights, and hidden behavior patterns. We also consider what this means for personal wellness tracking.” The conclusion I’ve chosen: my mild allergies trigger a stronger immune response that leads to extra recovery — hormesis. Check out the full deep research report here.

fun facts 🙌

Archers didn’t fire in volleys. Not only would a commander not tell archers to “fire” because their weapons don’t involve any fire, but also the concept that they released their arrows in coordinated all-at-once shooting isn’t real. ~ learn more

Juglone. This compound occurs naturally in the Junglandaceae family of plants, particularly the black walnut tree. It is toxic or growth-stunting to most things in its vicinity. “It is sometimes used as an herbicide, as a dye for cloth and inks, and as a coloring agent for foods and cosmetics.” ~ learn more

Kayfabe. “In professional wrestling, kayfabe (pronounced KAY-fayb) is the portrayal of staged events within the industry as "real" or "true", specifically the portrayal of competition, rivalries, and relationships between participants as being genuine and not staged.” ~ learn more

oh, austin 🤠

Turkeys in Texas. “If Wild Turkeys could smell, they'd be nearly impossible to hunt.” ~ learn more

tech, startups, internet ⚡

Genspark Super Agent. This is billed as an “All-in-One Super Agent, using various tools automatically to serve your everyday tasks.” Here’s a replay of it making a 1-minute South Park episode based on last week’s top news stories. ~ learn more

JP Morgan is hardening their stance on vendors’ cybersecurity. An open letter to “third-party suppliers” from their Chief Information Security Officer. “The modern ‘software as a service’ (SaaS) delivery model is quietly enabling cyber attackers and – as its adoption grows – is creating a substantial vulnerability that is weakening the global economic system.” At a time when it’s easier than ever to develop software, the table stakes for developing secure software are about to increase. ~ learn more

The o3 model knows where that photo was taken. “In a head-to-head Geoguessr match, OpenAI’s o3 model out-scored me—a Master I–ranked human—23,179 to 22,054, correctly identifying all five countries and twice landing within a few hundred metres. Even when I embedded fake GPS coordinates in the image EXIF, the model ignored the spoof and still pinpointed the real locations, showing its performance comes from visual reasoning and on-the-fly web sleuthing—not hidden metadata.” ~ learn more

Mark Zuckerberg on Meta's AGI plan. A recent interview covering, “Llama 4, benchmark gaming, open vs source, Intelligence explosion, business models for AGI” and more. ~ learn more

retail therapy 💸

Do eCommerce holding companies work? This is a casual conversation between two people who invest in and operate multiple d2c brands. “This week, [Fan Bi is] joined by Kelcey Lehrich, CEO of 365 Holdings, to talk about what actually works in DTC today and how real operators are surviving in a post-aggregator world.” ~ learn more

A 25-year-old hired a TikTok coach for $400. “She wasn’t trying to grow her personal brand: Under the coach’s guidance, Trecartin started posting three times per day about her water bottle accessory company CharCharms.” It’s working! She generated over $6 million of revenue last year. ~ learn more

on the blockchain ⛓

Crypto music is a joke. A manifesto on what value crypto can really provide to the music industry by a founder who is trying. “The music industry never asked for a blockchain protocol, an NFT fan club, or a “content coin.” What the industry has actually consistently been asking for are three boring, old-school things …” ~ learn more

Warren Buffet accidentally makes the case for Bitcoin. I say accidentally because he is 1000% not a fan of Bitcoin or any cryptocurrency. Yet, “The natural course of government is to make the currency worth less over time.” ~ learn more

thanks for reading!