P.S. You Should Know... | Issue #453

Shopping for a new school

my story 🚀

🍎 The school board recently voted to close our neighborhood elementary school at the end of this school year, so our family is on a new mission to choose the next environment for our little ones. I toured Alpha School this week, which bills itself as the AI Powered Private School. Essentially all the core subject matter is delivered via apps that provide a completely personalized and tracked experience, separating “grade level” of materials from a student’s chronological grade. Their marketing claim is that kids do an entire day’s worth of schoolwork in just 2 hours, leaving the rest of the day to pursue their interests and learn other life skills. It turns out this is a polarizing concept! I’m interested in hearing your thoughts if you have any.

On the way out the door, they handed me a branded gift box, the type that startups give to new hires. Inside I found a puzzle. My daughter tricked me into starting it with her right before bed time, but then she quickly abandoned it. By then, we had made it far enough that I was emotionally invested in finishing it. I will tell you that for a colorblind person this puzzle felt extra hard!

fun facts 🙌

Academic papers need not suck. “Sometimes you just kinda phone it in for a year, you know? I didn’t do a whole lot of research this year. Spent a lot of time on Twitter. Played around with GANs a little. I had a little momentum left over from last year [12] [1]; I managed to make some improvements to YOLO. But, honestly, nothing like super interesting, just a bunch of small changes that make it better. … First we’ll tell you what the deal is with YOLOv3. Then we’ll tell you how we do. We’ll also tell you about some things we tried that didn’t work. Finally we’ll contemplate what this all means.” ~ learn more

Can you walk Wisconsin’s shorelines? Shorewood resident Paul Florsheim takes a stand after receiving a trespassing ticket for walking along Lake Michigan’s shoreline. “I really actually want to go to court because I don’t think I was trespassing,” he argues, emphasizing the public’s right to Lake Michigan’s shoreline access. The verdict could set a precedent for public vs. private beach rights in Wisconsin. ~ learn more

First kiss was 21 million years ago. Researchers found that the mouth-on-mouth kiss dates back to our common ancestor with great apes. “We think kissing probably evolved around 21.5 million years ago in the large apes,” says Dr. Matilda Brindle. ~ learn more

Pennies Are Trash Now “There is no plan.” The U.S. Mint has abruptly stopped minting pennies, leaving 300 billion of them in circulation without any strategy for their future. Unlike Canada’s organized withdrawal, the U.S. seems to have given up on finding a solution for its ubiquitous one-cent coins, creating a perplexing dilemma. ~ learn more

oh, chicago 🏆

Cook County’s shifting tax burden. I have a property in Wicker Park that I finally got the tax bill for, and my taxes are up 50%. Reading about the issue, I discovered I have much to be thankful for. As the treasurer’s report highlights, “When the Loop gets a cold, the rest of the city gets pneumonia.” Neighborhoods on the South and West sides are hit hardest, with tax increases reaching up to 133%. ~ learn more

CTU’s financial scandal deepens. “Teachers are fighting their own leadership for the right to know where their money went. And that fight has finally reached Congress.” The Chicago Teachers Union is facing federal scrutiny over missing financial audits, with five years of audits demanded by Congress. The union’s refusal to release these audits has sparked a legal battle and could lead to reforms in federal labor law. ~ learn more

tech, startups, internet ⚡

Redesigning government websites for the better. This is what happens when Airbnb’s cofounder joins the government. “Work is super high impact, redesigning government interfaces that suck.” National Design Studio is on a mission to modernize user experiences in government systems, and they’re seeking top-notch engineers and designers to join the effort. Their new sites certainly look like a big improvement over other government sites. ~ learn more

Does Gemini Show That Scaling Still Works? No. “The data show the opposite: scaling works only in a diminishing sense, with each gain costing non-linearly far more than the last.” Google’s Gemini 3 is a testament to brute-force computation yielding only marginal gains, highlighting the industry’s drift into diminishing returns. ~ learn more

Beware of secondary markets. “Secondary markets are rife with fraud and bad actors, and it pains me to see these bottom feeders profiting off Anduril’s growth while fleecing retail investors through unreasonable or opaque fee structures.” Anduril co-founder Matt Grimm calls out an investment fund on X. ~ learn more

Transformation theater in tech. “Press releases announce ‘company-wide AI adoption.’ Hallway conversations tell a different story.” While firms tout AI revolutions, many employees aren’t even using the new tools. The facade of change replaces true innovation. ~ learn more

better doing 🎯

Junior job opportunities are vanishing. “Companies that adopt AI at higher rates are hiring juniors 13% less.” The traditional path for junior engineers is disappearing as AI automates entry-level work, leaving many young professionals struggling to enter the job market. ~ learn more

Playing entrepreneur on Hard Mode. “I wrote this because I have been feeling like Capitalism needs to be upgraded, and it seems like creating a pledge or manifesto—a movement to strengthen capitalism—might be the fastest way to do it.” The draft advocates for ethical business practices that prioritize societal welfare and fair competition. ~ learn more

retail therapy 💸

Your digital ‘property’ isn’t really yours. Do you own your gaming skins? “Legally, you don’t.” In a dramatic market move, Valve’s change in game rules for Counter-Strike 2 exposed a $2B loss in virtual investments, highlighting a blind spot in digital ownership. ~ learn more

under the microscope 🔬

We induced smells with ultrasound. Researchers targeted the scent-processing region of the brain using an ultrasound probe. “We pointed an ultrasound probe at the scent-processing region of the brain to obtain different sensations,” including “the smell of garbage, like few-day-old fruit peels,” and “a campfire smell of burning wood.” ~ learn more

Tiny robots swim through blood, deliver drugs - and then dissolve. “A remote-controlled robot the size of a grain of sand can swim through blood vessels to deliver drugs before dissolving into the body.” This technology may enable targeted drug delivery, minimizing side effects by avoiding body-wide treatments. ~ learn more

A deep-sea worm uses toxins as armor. In blazing hydrothermal vents, Paralvinella hessleri transforms lethal arsenic into armor. “Inside this deep-sea chemistry lab, the two poisons lock together into solid orpiment (As₂S₃) crystals, transforming them from lethal threats into inert, glittering deposits.” ~ learn more

thoughts of food 🍔

The soaring price of a steak. “Herd sizes have shrunk after years of extreme weather, high input costs and disease. The result is record prices amplified by a wave of protein-hungry consumers and by Trump’s sweeping tariffs, especially those on Brazil, the world’s biggest beef exporter. The political fallout is not just an issue in the US. In Europe and the UK, surging beef prices have fanned food inflation, straining household budgets.” ~ learn more

teaching the kids 👩‍🏫

Elite universities and disability claims. At Stanford, 38% of students are claiming disabilities, primarily for mental health and learning challenges like ADHD and anxiety. This raises questions about whether these diagnoses are becoming identity markers rather than medical conditions. ~ learn more

big ideas 📚

The nuclear waste problem no one is fixing. This is a very informative presentation. You have to share your email with the creator to access it. “The U.S. invented nuclear power-yet today, it’s the nation with the largest volume of nuclear waste and the least progress toward a real solution. Meanwhile, a Nuclear Renaissance is gaining momentum-socially, politically, and commercially-while the back-end of the fuel cycle remains largely ignored. … Ultimately, we see this messy, underbuilt, and often-avoided domain—perhaps the most complex problem in the entire nuclear stack—as a defining opportunity. Whoever helps solve it will be in pole position to own the architecture of the next nuclear era.” ~ learn more

Nuclear divide in Wyoming. “There are people in the middle who are not being represented,” says Bar Nunn resident Lee-Ann Newquist. As debates heat up over nuclear waste storage in Wyoming, many residents find themselves uncertain about the future and frustrated by a lack of unbiased information. Radiant Industries, the company that was considering building a reactor-factory in Wyoming, has since backed out due to the cold reception by locals. ~ learn more

China’s new tax on condoms. In a move to boost birth rates, China will impose a 13% VAT on contraceptive products, marking its first tax on such items in three decades. “Removing the VAT exemption is largely symbolic and unlikely to have much impact on the bigger picture,” according to demographer He Yafu. ~ learn more

thanks for reading!