P.S. You Should Know... | Issue #436

Heading home!

my story 🚀

🐙 On our last weekend in Chicago we had a wonderful visit to the Shedd Aquarium. Thanks to this visit, I decided that I have a new favorite fish: the Arapaima. Those residing at Shedd were confiscated at O’Hare Airport in 2015 after being illegally imported. They were tiny, 3-4 inches. Today they are giants over 5 feet long and 250 lbs. They look like sea monsters from the dinosaur era. Also, they breathe air and have to surface periodically for oxygen!

fun facts 🙌

Slow. “What problems can human beings only solve over a very long period of time?” ~ learn more

38 weird facts about plants. I sent #20 to Kim right away: “Broccoli, kale, cabbage, and Brussels sprouts are all the EXACT same species...Brassica oleracea. Humans selectively bred them for different traits: leaves (kale), flower buds (broccoli), stems (kohlrabi), etc.” ~ learn more

oh, chicago 🏆

Pritzker to city: drop dead. “The governor just pummeled Chicago with more than $11 billion in new pension liabilities at the worst possible time. Residents deserve answers.” ~ learn more

tech, startups, internet ⚡

Advice and lessons for healthcare founders. I’d say this is applicable to other industries as well. “Almost Everything You See Online is Wrong or Embellished … Just remember that anything that anyone posts online is a form of marketing. I can guarantee you that several of the companies you’ve seen being celebrated for their success were exits that returned 0 money.” ~ learn more

Software is changing (again). “Drawing on his work at Stanford, OpenAI, and Tesla, Andrej [Karpathy] sees a shift underway. Software is changing, again. We’ve entered the era of “Software 3.0,” where natural language becomes the new programming interface and models do the rest. He explores what this shift means for developers, users, and the design of software itself— that we're not just using new tools, but building a new kind of computer.” ~ learn more

My AI skeptic friends are all nuts. “First, we need to get on the same page. If you were trying and failing to use an LLM for code 6 months ago, you’re not doing what most serious LLM-assisted coders are doing. People coding with LLMs today use agents. Agents get to poke around your codebase on their own. They author files directly. They run tools. They compile code, run tests, and iterate on the results.” ~ learn more

The bitter lesson vs the garbage can. “And that is the Bitter Lesson — encoding human understanding into an AI tends to be worse than just letting the AI figure out how to solve the problem, and adding enough computing power until it can do it better than any human. The lesson is bitter because it means that our human understanding of problems built from a lifetime of experience is not that important in solving a problem with AI. Decades of researchers' careful work encoding human expertise was ultimately less effective than just throwing more computation at the problem. We are soon going to see whether the Bitter Lesson applies widely to the world of work.” ~ learn more

better doing 🎯

Cocktail party ideas. People often discuss trendy topics with a certainty that can only come from a surface level of understanding, or misunderstanding. “Asking people why they think their solutions would solve valuable problems in the field has become a hobby of mine when I'm at parties where this kind of superficial pseudo-technical discussion dominates the party.” ~ learn more

Why your brain needs a box cutter. The romanticized version of a career is not the career. “Apparently 57% of Gen Z would like to be social media stars, and that’s almost certainly because they haven’t unpacked what it would actually take to make it. How many of them have Mr. Beast-level insanity? How many are willing to become indentured servants to the algorithm, to organize their lives around feeding it whatever content it demands that day? One in a million?” ~ learn more

under the microscope 🔬

Epigenetic aging tests are high variance in a short time. “Vigorous physical activity was found to rejuvenate epigenetic clocks, with significant decreases in DNAmGrimAge2 [32%] and DNAmFitAge [18%] observed immediately after games. Among player subgroups, midfielders exhibited the most substantial epigenetic rejuvenation effect following games.” ~ learn more

on the blockchain ⛓

Coinbase UK commercial. “If everything is fine, then don’t change anything at all.” ~ learn more

profiles of people 🚶

How to live forever and get rich doing it. “Peter Diamandis is five feet four and has pipestem legs, but his torso widens into broad shoulders, powerful biceps, and a craggy, Homeric head. The composite effect is of a genie emerging from a lamp. Our wish is his command, and our wish, surely, must be for more time to make wishes: for limitless life.” ~ learn more

Jamie Gull’s aerospace dreams. Here’s a short and sweet profile of a founder I once backed who has now launched an interesting deep tech venture fund. “From child pilot to aerospace engineer and then startup founder to VC, Jamie Gull’s journey is not just a career arc; it’s a blueprint for how deep tech can power the future.” ~ learn more

thanks for reading!