P.S. You Should Know... | Issue #430

Summertime

my story 🚀

⚓ We had a family friendly boating day last weekend and it was lots of fun in the sun. Chicago does not disappoint! The Solara is docked at the brand new Navy Pier Marina this season (right under the ferris wheel). Reach out for a special newsletter subscriber deal on charters.

✨ Beware the AI agents. They seem smart, but they’re dumb. I caught my Cursor agent trying to reset my production database. “You're absolutely right to question that! I made a mistake - we definitely don't want to reset your production database. That would wipe out all your existing data. Let me cancel that and show you better ways to test the system.” An hour later, it tried to do it again.

fun facts 🙌

30 minutes with a stranger. “In this story, we'll go through 30 minutes of conversation between the people you see here. They are a subset of nearly 1,700 conversations between about 1,500 people as part of a research project called the CANDOR corpus. The goal was to gather a huge amount of data to spur research on how we converse.” ~ learn more

Why it’s nearly impossible to buy an original Bob Ross painting. “During his lifetime, Ross produced tens of thousands of paintings. Yet, only a handful of his works have popped up for sale in recent years. When they do appear, they often fetch $10k+ and attract dozens of bids.” ~ learn more

GRFT: the government grift ETF, coming September 2025. “Thesis: People in or close to government and politicians have an edge in investing. ETF will seek total return based on that thesis by holding 10-30 stocks selected via proprietary process…” ~ learn more

tech, startups, internet ⚡

Toward conversional diagnostic artificial intelligence. Here's a neat study recently published in Nature. Researchers designed and conducted a blinded experiment comparing primary care physicians versus AMIE, a conversational AI, when it came to text chat interaction with patient-actors. “Across multiple axes, corresponding to both specialist physician (30 out of 32) and patient-actor (25 out of 26) perspectives, AMIE was rated as superior to PCPs while being non-inferior on the rest.” What will happen when they slap a human face on it? ~ learn more

Context engineering > prompt engineering. Hear it from the guy who coined the term vibe coding, Andrej Karpathy! “People associate prompts with short task descriptions you'd give an LLM in your day-to-day use. When in every industrial-strength LLM app, context engineering is the delicate art and science of filling the context window with just the right information for the next step.” ~ learn more

Neuralink is getting good. “Two people playing Call of Duty using their minds.” I hope, and somewhat fear, that this is real. ~ learn more

better doing 🎯

6 lessons I learned working at an art gallery. I really like that these are not standard cliche lessons. For example, “4. If you care about beauty, you should care about economic growth, too” ~ learn more

Machine learning lesson by way of Mongolian Yurts. “I was unable to find a count of the yurts in Mongolia, this left me with the task of doing it myself. Although I had never studied or worked with machine learning, I knew through some osmosis that machine learning is well fit for this task.” ~ learn more

under the microscope 🔬

Small study, big results for Type I diabetes. “Zimislecel is an allogeneic stem cell–derived islet-cell therapy. … Ten of the 12 participants (83%) had insulin independence and were not using exogenous insulin at day 365.” ~ learn more

Largest study ever done on cannabis? “The study, the largest of its kind ever to be completed, examined the effects of cannabis use on over 1,000 young adults aged 22 to 36 using brain imaging technology. The researchers found that 63% of heavy lifetime cannabis users exhibited reduced brain activity during a working memory task, while 68% of recent users also demonstrated a similar impact.” ~ learn more

Scientists glue two proteins together, driving cancer cells to self-destruct. Thanks to the humans who keep expanding the frontiers of science and medicine! “Stanford researchers hope new technique will flip lymphoma protein's normal action - from preventing cell death to triggering it.” ~ learn more

teaching the kids 👩‍🏫

How to start a school with your friends. “FractalU is a “school” for adults, taught from living rooms in New York City. We’ve run over 100 classes and taught thousands of students. Classes meet weekly and are held on evenings and weekends, since most of our students and teachers are working professionals.” ~ learn more

big ideas 📚

The cost of solar pv drops so low that solar thermal’s in trouble. This plant in California uses solar thermal, directing the sun’s energy to heat water to make steam to drive a turbine. Nowadays it’s cheaper to use photovoltaic solar cells to generate power directly. That poses a problem for this power plant. “The Ivanpah solar power plant formally opened in 2014 on roughly 5 square miles of federal land near the California-Nevada border. Though it was hailed at the time as a breakthrough moment for clean energy, its power has been struggling to compete with cheaper solar technologies.” ~ learn more

Why Japan succeeds despite stagnation. “Japan’s success in the face of demographic collapse and economic stagnation is one way of proving the importance of housing policy and social order. Getting those things right, as Japan has, creates a foundation strong enough to withstand three decades of zero growth.” ~ learn more

on the blockchain ⛓

Ethereum’s disintermediation crisis. “Ethereum is surrendering its most valuable asset: its network effects. It could have been the global economic hub — the hub through which all onchain financial flows move. But by pursuing its L2-centric roadmap, Ethereum blundered. … The situation is dire. But it is not too late.” ~ learn more

Crypto job applicants, beware of North Korean honeypots! “A North Korean hacking group is using Python-based malware disguised as fake job applications to target crypto workers.” ~ learn more

thanks for reading!