P.S. You Should Know... | Issue #445

Tossing Bags

my story 🚀

A casual game of bags

🌈 My daughter explained that she wanted each toss resemble a rainbow. She practiced underhand tossing in P.E. this week, which led to her strong showing in our game of bags. Note: while some call this game cornhole, in Champaign, IL it’s always called bags, so that’s the way it’ll always be in my household.

✨ I played with the new Sora app this week from OpenAI, and it feels like the predecessor to a big hit. Imagine an Instagram-like feed, except 100% of the videos are computer-generated by prompt, and you can riff off any of them to make your own. For example, “this, but make it george washington” would replace the main character with our O.G. president. At the very least, it’s a brand new playing field for content creators across platforms.

fun facts 🙌

Price’s law. “Price’s law says that 50% of the work is done by the square root of the total number of people who participate in the work.” ~ learn more

AOL’s dial up internet takes its last bow. As recently as 2023 there were still 160k households using the service. Meanwhile, I haven’t had a landline phone in what feels like decades. ~ learn more

JPMorgan’s insult added to its injury. They are “footing a staggering $115 million bill for the army of lawyers who defended convicted fraudster Charlie Javice and her former colleague Olivier Amar — a sum nearly two-thirds of what the bank paid for their ill-fated student-finance startup Frank.” ~ learn more

oh, chicago 🏆

Fear in Logan Square affects sales. “You can sense the fear in the air,” describes an employee at Armitage Produce. Following a federal smoke bomb incident, businesses in Chicago’s Logan Square are experiencing slow sales as residents stay indoors, wary of federal agents. I assume this is only the beginning. ~ learn more

oh, austin 🤠

Base Power, a two-year-old power company based in Texas. I absolutely love this idea. “Though many power companies are focusing on building giant industrial batteries as a way to store energy — often generated by wind or solar facilities — and provide it when demand rises, Base Power is building what amounts to a fleet of home batteries.” I also love that while the founder of this company is Michael Dell’s son, this is not a nepotism story at all. “He’s an incredible mentor, coach and friend,” the younger Mr. Dell said. “But this is being built kind of independent of his capital and direct resources.” ~ learn more

tech, startups, internet ⚡

Meta’s newest Ray-Ban glasses. I was already impressed by the prior version, though I don’t own a pair. These not only have a built in screen, but also a new control device that’ll probably make or break their success. “Each pair comes with Meta Neural Band, an EMG wristband that interprets the natural signals created by your muscle activity to navigate the features of your glasses — letting you control experiences intuitively using subtle hand movements, without having to touch your glasses or take out your phone.” ~ learn more

OpenAI aims to become the Windows of AI. Ben Thompson argues that OpenAI is creating an ecosystem much like Windows in the PC era. “Apps won’t be on your phone or in a browser; they’ll be in ChatGPT, and if they aren’t, they simply will not exist for ChatGPT users.” By owning the user experience and integrating apps directly into ChatGPT, OpenAI is making a bold play for platform dominance. ~ learn more

Introducing Figure 03. Hey, check out this cool new humanoid robot! “Our goal is to deliver a truly general-purpose robot - one that can perform human-like tasks and learn directly from people. To realize this vision, our engineering and design teams completed a ground-up hardware and software redesign to ship Figure 03…” ~ learn more

better doing 🎯

The power of SuperGoals. “[S]ometimes the stakes are much higher than usual. In these instances, a goal requires even more focus, execution, and clarity. All of these can be achieved through a framework that I have come to call SuperGoals, which I’ve relied on heavily throughout my career. Below, I’ll share my framework for SuperGoals, along with real life examples of how I’ve used them.” ~ learn more

Help them figure it out. I like this message even though it turns into a sales pitch at the end. “There’s a story that occurs constantly in the biographies of many creative and brilliant people. It goes something like this: As a kid they had a question—maybe it was about how car engines work, or what Antarctica is like. It doesn’t matter if the question is about history or science or animals, because their dads all had the same response. They said, “I don’t know, but let’s go figure it out!” So they went to the library or the hardware store or the computer and they dug around and they found the answer.” ~ learn more

to your health ⚕

Can monetary rewards really boost health outcomes? The debate on using financial incentives to promote healthy behaviors is ongoing. As noted in the article, “outcomes depend heavily on design,” with some programs effectively motivating desired actions by carefully structuring the incentives. The nuances of successful programs, however, often involve more than just throwing money at people. ~ learn more

Most correlations are not causal. “Simply selectively following advice, going along with fads, believing what’s popular and acting on it, and so on, can lead to correlations that ‘make sense’ from some research reference frame, but are not actually true.” ~ learn more

under the microscope 🔬

Myocardial infarction may be an infectious disease. A Finnish-UK study shakes up our understanding, suggesting heart attacks could stem from infections. Researchers found dormant bacteria in biofilms within artery plaques, which, when activated by a trigger like a viral infection, can provoke inflammation and cause heart attacks. ~ learn more

big ideas 📚

A different view on data centers and rising electricity rates. “Someone asked me about electricity rates increasing in areas that are serving new AI datacenters. It’s a fascinating story because it reveals multiple levels of coordination failure.” ~ learn more

A Bitcoin-denominated regulated life insurer. The news is they raised some venture money, not not super newsy, but I look at it as the continued growth in the landscape of crypto products. “Founded in Bermuda, Meanwhile offers life insurance and annuity products denominated in BTC, allowing policyholders to save and transfer wealth in an asset with a fixed supply.” ~ learn more

on the blockchain ⛓

Trust issues fuel asset inflation. Citadel’s Ken Griffin puts it plainly: “We’re seeing substantial asset inflation away from the dollar as people are looking for ways to effectively de-dollarize.” As trust in U.S. institutions erodes, capital flows into crypto hit an all-time high of $6 billion last week. [note: since then, I read that trade war news has reversed the flows — 🙄] ~ learn more

profiles of people 🚶

How an Enron parody turned into a financial mess of its own. “In our first interview in Fayetteville, Gaydos seemed to perfectly parody tech bro hubris. He insisted that the Enron nuclear reactor was real “in theory” and that “we have a team of people that are developing nuclear reactors to help the president solve the energy crisis.” He encouraged me to speak with the Egg’s purported inventor, Daniel Wong, who refused to disclose the makeup of the research team, his past experience or pretty much anything else concrete about the project.” ~ learn more

thanks for reading!