P.S. You Should Know... | Issue #444
Gradually, then suddenly
my story 🚀
I was very excited by the release of two new AI tools this week:
Perplexity’s Comet Browser. This is now available to the general public, of which I am an upstanding member. I downloaded it last night and played around for a bit and it’s neat! In the future your browser will surf the internet for you, doing things on your behalf and aggregating data for your digestion. One example: I joined a professional club this year. I prompted the browser to “Use my gmail to create a list of all of the [club] people I’ve met this year.” It did a fantastic job, eventually citing 118 emails and providing what I think is an almost complete list, and also grouping folks into relevant clusters.
Claude and Slack. This integration promises to help me use the vast amount of information in my company Slack to help my team and I perform better. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get it to work! This is not the first failed experience I have had with promised integrations, but I won’t give up hope. After all, I expect the tools to gradually get better until suddenly they’re great!
fun facts 🙌
When not to trust Wikipedia. “Wikipedia claimed Roth’s book “The Human Stain” was inspired by the life of writer Anatole Broyard. Roth said this was “in no way substantiated by fact.” He should know: he wrote it. … Roth contacted a Wikipedia official, who put him in touch with a site admin, hoping to get it rectified, and Roth wrote a letter to the admin (probably by typewriter). The admin responded that he, Philip Roth, “was not a credible source” on Philip Roth—and told him to find a secondary source!” The story reminds me of this great clip from an old movie, Back to School. ~ learn more
How to draw construction equipment for kids. “But despite being very deliberately hand-drawn, Taback’s illustrations include a really wonderful amount of detail. If he draws a dump truck in profile, he’ll be clear to capture the wires and hydraulics. Wheels have clearly-delineated rivets. Vehicles have model numbers. Construction helmets have tape with the owners’ name scribbled on them as well as labels with the brand name.” ~ learn more
Greenland is a beautiful nightmare. “Greenland appeared to have roughly 9 people living there and maybe 5 things to look at. Even professional travel personalities seemed to be scraping the bottom of the barrel. … It reminded me a lot of driving through Indiana. For those not in the US, Indiana is a state in the US famous for being a state one must drive through in order to get somewhere better.” ~ learn more
oh, chicago 🏆
Cook County is months late collecting property taxes. I have an annual reminder in my todo list so that I don’t accidentally forget to pay a property tax bill. After several months of kicking it out into the future because no bill is available I asked a friend why. “The delay stems from a years-long technology upgrade that county officials say is more complex than anticipated, and residents are growing increasingly frustrated.” ~ learn more
The lobbying story behind the botched county systems upgrade (above). Here’s the punchline: “This, sadly, is the ‘Chicago Way’ — on steroids.” … “Tyler Technologies’ major county contracts – peppered with delays and cost overruns – were shepherded by well-connected lobbyist Jay Doherty, who is set to be sentenced this summer for his role in the unrelated utility scandal.” ~ learn more
tech, startups, internet ⚡
A bitter lesson for the bitter lesson fanboys. This is a really great interview by Dwarkesh Patel, who I think is really on a roll the past ~year. “Richard Sutton is the father of reinforcement learning, winner of the 2024 Turing Award, and author of The Bitter Lesson. And he thinks LLMs are a dead end.” ~ learn more
Andrej Karpathy’s take on the Richard Sutton interview (above). “So that brings us to where we are. Stated plainly, today’s frontier LLM research is not about building animals. It is about summoning ghosts. You can think of ghosts as a fundamentally different kind of point in the space of possible intelligences. They are muddled by humanity. Thoroughly engineered by it. They are these imperfect replicas, a kind of statistical distillation of humanity’s documents with some sprinkle on top.” ~ learn more
Why Google will win the AI race. “The AI race feels like a sprint right now, with OpenAI grabbing headlines and Meta open-sourcing everything they can. But if you’re placing bets on who wins the marathon, don’t overlook the company that’s been running this race since before most people knew there was a race to run. Google has structural advantages that become more decisive as AI shifts from clever demos to planetary-scale deployment.” ~ learn more
better doing 🎯
How social media shortens your life. “The most common noun in the English language is “time”. We talk obsessively about time because it’s the most important thing in the universe. Without it, nothing can happen. And yet most of us treat time as if it’s the least important thing. We kick up a fuss when tech giants steal our data, but we’ve been strangely nonchalant as those same companies carry out the greatest heist of our time in history.” ~ learn more
How organizations are like slime molds. “There’s a hidden force that makes life in successful organizations increasingly miserable. It’s invisible, so we either don’t see it... or we at least pretend not to. But the force is inescapable and affects everything that happens within an organization.” ~ learn more
retail therapy 💸
The last days of social media. Here’s a missive about the end of the era of social media, the start of the AI-generated content swamp era that we’re in now, and a hope for a future where someone has created a solution for this problem. In the meantime, I guess everybody’s turning to messaging groups and paywalled communities. ~ learn more
under the microscope 🔬
Steel wheels instead of rubber tires. “The trouble with rubber tires, especially on heavy vehicles that operate in harsh conditions, is that they wear out quickly. In the case of working mining vehicles, that means replacing tires every 6-9 months, and GACW estimates this can work out to as much as US$7 million in tire costs for a single mining truck over its lifetime.” ~ learn more
Microwave weapon downs 49 drones with a single blast. “Named after the Spartan king who held off a Persian invasion with a vastly inferior force at the Battle of Thermopylae, Leonidas is one of a family of weapons based on using long-pulse microwave beams to burn out the electronics of small drones.” ~ learn more
big ideas 📚
The case for insane asylums. This is probably controversial and borderline political, but I will share anyway. “a recounting of recent attacks by the insane, a history of america’s attempts to deal with severe mental illness, and an argument for the return of long-term psychiatric institutionalization” ~ learn more
Per capita energy-related CO2 emissions down in every US state. Between the years 2005 and 2023 the average decrease is -30%, driven by a shift away from coal power plants. “In Maryland, coal and natural gas accounted for 56% and 4%, respectively, of in-state electricity generation in 2005, but coal and natural gas shares nearly reversed to 5% and 41%, respectively, in 2023.” ~ learn more