P.S. You Should Know... | Issue #437

Six Flags Fiesta Texas

my story 🚀

Jumping for joy after the first ride at Six Flags

🎢 To cap off a very busy week we had a great visit to the Six Flags in San Antonio. It was the first time both kids were brave enough for all of the rides.

fun facts 🙌

Play this game. Can you trick an LLM into giving you the password? I managed to beat level 6, but got stuck at level 7. “Your goal is to make Gandalf reveal the secret password for each level. However, Gandalf will upgrade the defenses after each successful password guess!” ~ learn more

What exactly did non-royal nobles do when they were at court? “From every period movie and TV show I've seen…, they seemed to do nothing but hang out all day at the palace, not doing anything in particular. Is that what life "at court" really consisted of?” This reddit thread has a great answer to the question, based on the Bourbon court of France. ~ learn more

Researchers discover ‘olo’, a color humans have never seen. Maybe you are all colorblind too!? No, not really. Through some wild contraption that blasts a laser into an eyeball, people see Olo when only their medium length cones are activated, which doesn’t really happen otherwise. ~ learn more

tech, startups, internet ⚡

Hacking AI is too easy. “Can you hack AI? In this video I sit down with elite AI hacker Jason Haddix to unpack how attackers compromise AI-enabled apps—not just jailbreak chatbots, but exfiltrate customer data, abuse tool calls, and pivot across systems.” This is where I found the Gandolph game. ~ learn more

Nobody knows how to build with AI yet. “There's this moment in every new technology where everyone pretends they know what they're doing. We're past that moment. Or maybe we haven't reached it yet. Either way, we're in this delicious middle ground where nobody can pretend expertise because the whole thing keeps changing under our feet.” ~ learn more

How Discord stores trillions of messages. In 2017 they published a technical post about how they stored billions. Here’s the follow-up: “We wanted a database that grew alongside us, but hopefully, its maintenance needs wouldn’t grow alongside our storage needs. Unfortunately, we found that to not be the case — our Cassandra cluster exhibited serious performance issues that required increasing amounts of effort to just maintain, not improve.” ~ learn more

The largest arbitrage in technology. The case for the AI-enabled rollup. “The reason it remains attractive boils down to one thing – AI capabilities currently far outstrip market distribution. As long as that fact remains true, there is an arbitrage opportunity that likely represents one of the largest opportunities in technology today.” ~ learn more

better doing 🎯

Stop solving your team’s problems for them. “Many leaders today are struggling to balance the aspiration of being supportive with the reality of feeling overwhelmed by their own to-do list. But when a well-meaning leader becomes the default problem-solver, the entire organization pays the price.” ~ learn more

Purposeful tinkering and grit tend to forge the strongest software engineers. “Formal education is valuable, but it is optimized for scale. It distills messy practice into neat sequences that fit a semester. Those recipes create useful proficiency, yet they rarely cultivate the intuition needed when the recipe breaks at 3 a.m. on prod.” ~ learn more

to your health ⚕

Don’t die of heart disease. “You should be scared of heart disease. Heart disease is the leading cause of death globally, and it’s not just an old people problem. 25% of heart attacks occur in people under the age of 55. … As far as preventative health goes, it’s easy, and my goal with this is to provide the knowledge, tools, and playbook to help you take control of your heart health the same way an elite billionaire would. For almost everyone, you don’t have to die of heart disease if you don’t want to.” ~ learn more

What is a fridge cigarette? This hits me hard. “The ‘fridge cigarette’ is Gen Z’s answer to the smoke break—an ice-cold Diet Coke straight from the refrigerator.” ~ learn more

under the microscope 🔬

New study shows glucose monitors don’t lead to lower blood glucose. Reading the study, the results aren’t surprising to me. You may recall that I’m fond of this technology, so what’s up? Well, I’ve always maintained that this tech by itself is not enough to drive change. The CGM can provide data, but it’s up to the wearer to get value from it! Frequent interaction with a coaching or process helps turn the data into value. This study used 10,000 adult medical records, but there wasn’t any real intervention besides a doctor’s prescription for a CGM. ~ learn more

Self-sabotage. This is interesting research. “We found that some people just don’t learn from experience,” said the study’s corresponding author, Dr Philip Jean-Richard Dit Bressel, a behavioral neuroscientist and experimental psychologist at UNSW’s School of Psychology. “Even when they’re motivated to avoid harm and are paying attention, they fail to realize their own behavior is causing the problem.” ~ learn more

big ideas 📚

Why is fertility down, and how much should you worry about it? An optimistic point of view that I’ll subscribe to! “These are just a few examples in which tech has been the ultimate cause of the fertility drop. Can we expect that trend to reverse, and have tech instead increase fertility? Yes, I think so. To understand this, we need to first make sense of the causes of the fertility drop.” ~ learn more

thanks for reading!