my story 🚀
🎙️ We’re back with another podcast link from the P.S. You Should Know audience (both the host and the guest!). From Moldova to Manufacturing Mastery: The Khakham Family’s Journey to Building Gil Sewing. This was extra cool to listen to because there were so many anecdotes that I would likely never have heard without an interview like this one. I wish more of my friends would go on podcasts!
fun facts 🙌
DoggoGuessr. If you like dogs and quizzes this is your link. ~ learn more
Decibels are ridiculous. “What’s a decibel? Well, the most common answer is “uhh". The second most common answer is that it’s “a way to measure loudness”. But it isn’t! A decibel is not a unit in any conventional sense: it’s more akin to a prefix such as mega- in megabyte. It describes a change in magnitude.” ~ learn more
Tho-Radia, 1930’s radium makeup. This beauty influencer just couldn’t resist trying it on. Wow. ~ learn more
oh, austin 🤠
Texas lottery winner sues to collect because the state’s not paying up. Her complaint says that the lottery commission ghosted her, rather than paying or denying her $87.5 million prize, because she had purchased her winning ticket through a courier service app owned by DraftKings. ~ learn more
Tesla robotaxis will hit the streets of Austin in June. I am not expecting these to be anywhere as smooth as the Waymo cars, which have already aroused the ire of my neighborhood’s email listserv. I, for one, think Waymo is a better driver than lots of humans, so I’m for it. ~ learn more
tech, startups, internet ⚡
Secondaries will not save VC. “Venture Capitalist continue to not-generate returns for their investors. Not all of them, of course (and they’re not the only ones), but as an asset class, Venture overpaid by a country mile, and now having ‘bought high,’ their only option is ‘sell low,’ and that’s no way to generate returns.” ~ learn more
Multimodal AI outperforms single source cancer predictions. “After implementing numerous AI solutions in healthcare settings, I've developed healthy skepticism toward any approach claiming comprehensive insights from a single data modality. … This is where the paper represents something genuinely different from typical AI hype. … SURVPATH tackles a fundamental integration challenge most AI systems conveniently sidestep, connecting visual patterns from histology with molecular pathways driving disease progression.” ~ learn more
Sequoia Capital gathered 150 AI leaders to share their vision into the future. This is a nice compilation of clips. They are confident that the value will accrue to the application layer, and maybe the big AI labs will capture that market after all. “To start the session, the Partners from Sequoia presented their first hand insights of where the opportunity in AI lays right now, and how to capitalize on it…” ~ learn more
better doing 🎯
The asymmetric likelihood of winning. “The concept that I call the surface area of success is all about creating an asymmetric likelihood of winning in the market. It is orchestrating the circumstances and context of the startup where the likelihood of success moves from highly unlikely to highly probable.” ~ learn more
You could just choose optimism. “There’s something strange and a little awe-inspiring about hearing someone ask for champagne on a two-hour domestic flight. … Champagne, really? … Maybe you really can take the champagne approach—not just to flying, but to everything. Maybe there are opportunities to celebrate all of the time. What if you can just choose to be optimistic, even when life feels bad?” ~ learn more
Stephen King’s most misused piece of writing advice. King was quoted saying, “Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.” … Well, this author thinks “And that is nonsense (also bunkum, hooey, hogwash, twaddle, and poppycock). A thesaurus a treasure trove of words cataloged with a librarian’s exactness to help writers compose the best phrase to express their ideas and thoughts.” ~ learn more
to your health ⚕
‘Oura Paranoia’ from too much information. “You could call it Oura paranoia, though the phenomenon is hardly exclusive to any one product: As wearable health technology, including Apple Watches and Fitbits, have become more popular in recent years, some users have struggled with the unintended psychological side effects of the devices.” I don’t know that I have the right approach, but I avoid this by keeping my sights on sustainable lifestyle adjustments and not dwelling too long on any measurements. ~ learn more
“Mr. Secretary, Reclassify the Statin.” Here’s an interesting thought: “Amid the gewgaws and heavy machinery of federal health policy there sits a single, absurdly obvious lever: reclassify a low-dose statin (say, atorvastatin 10 mg or rosuvastatin 5 mg) from Rx-only to true, Walmart-checkout-aisle OTC. Pull it, and you do more for cardiovascular prevention than a decade of slogan-heavy wellness campaigns.” ~ learn more
under the microscope 🔬
The case against the placebo effect. This one cut me deep. My foundational belief in the placebo effect’s efficacy is shaken. It’ll take some more time and reading for me to fully come around to this point of view, but I am no longer going to mouth off about placebos as if I know a thing. “To repeat my earlier maxim, if there is a statistically significant effect of placebo on an objective outcome, chances are it is either noise, fraud, questionable research practices, or a mischaracterization of a subjective outcome as objective.” ~ learn more
Model organisms are not static. “In 2006, researchers at the University of Alberta tried to replicate a 1993 mouse study. But they found that the stress levels of their mice, when put through an anxiety-producing maze, differed from the original data. They attributed this discrepancy in results to minor variations between laboratories, but could something else have been amiss?” ~ learn more