P.S. You Should Know... | Issue #467

Hello goats

my story 🚀

🐐 I snapped this photo while on a walk with a friend in East Austin. It makes me smile because a) it’s February and it was a pleasant day for a walk; b) these goats live among us and also enjoy soaking up some sun.

fun facts 🙌

Barbed wire fence telephone networks. If you didn’t know that you could wire a phone to a barbed wire fence to call a few miles away to the neighboring farm, then you are not alone. “the barbed wire networks had no central exchange, no operators–and no monthly bill.” Rural households turned fences into ad hoc phone lines where “every call made every phone on the system ring.” ~ learn more

A field guide to historic phone tech. I had Claude put this together for me after learning about the above barbed wire fence phone networks. Not bad! ~ learn more

One space billionaire is trolling another on X. “The company’s coat of arms prominently features two turtles, a reference to one of Aesop’s Fables, ‘The Tortoise and the Hare,’ in which the slow and steady tortoise wins the race over a quicker but overconfident hare.” Bezos posted the turtle right after Musk signaled a SpaceX pivot toward the Moon, and Ars says Blue Origin now has an “accelerated” a Moon landing plan without requiring orbital refueling. ~ learn more

Escape the tip screen. “You’re now asked to tip at airports, stadiums, and self-checkouts.” A tiny browser game about the modern tip prompt creeping into everything. ~ learn more

oh, austin 🤠

STAAR pep rallies everywhere. “Scrolling through social media this week, I saw posts from across the state. Marching bands and celebrity guests at pep rallies, reality TV–themed contests, special dress days, and more, all dedicated to the STAAR test.” A Texas Monthly reporter traces how a standardized test turned into a full-on school culture event, and why all that buildup can backfire into anxiety. ~ learn more

tech, startups, internet ⚡

Lab test resellers are go to court. Function says Superpower ran a “sweeping campaign of deception” by marketing “100+ biomarkers” even though some are “algorithmically derived” rather than directly measured. Two preventative-health rivals, both outsourcing diagnostics to Quest, are now fighting over claims and definitions more than bloodwork. ~ learn more

The singularity will occur on a Tuesday. “The data says: machines are improving at a constant rate. Humans are freaking out about it at an accelerating rate that accelerates its own acceleration.” ~ learn more

No humans allowed to review. “Code must not be reviewed by humans” is part of StrongDM’s koan for their Software Factory, where “specs + scenarios drive agents that write code, run harnesses, and converge without human review.” ~ learn more

Long tasks finally work. “One developer supervising five long-task agents isn’t just 5x productivity — it starts to feel like a different kind of work.” The post describes an Emulator Challenge where GLM5 builds a Game Boy Advance emulator in JavaScript, stays consistent across “800 context switches and 700 tool calls”, and keeps making progress by following a simple work-test-log loop. ~ learn more

better doing 🎯

Management is the AI superpower. “As evaluating those results becomes increasingly time consuming, the value of being good at delegation increases.” Mollick’s take is that the bottleneck is shifting from doing the work to specifying, reviewing, and iterating, which makes classic management skills oddly valuable again. ~ learn more

Avoid prisoner’s dilemmas. “The only satisfying solution to the prisoner’s dilemma is to avoid prisoner’s dilemmas.” A useful lens for work politics: lots of dysfunction comes from people acting rationally inside badly designed incentives. ~ learn more

retail therapy 💸

Who is Michael Grimes? He’s a tech investment banker. “He played hours of FarmVille before the Facebook IPO and actually worked as a driver before taking Uber public.” John Coogan argues Grimes is a rare tech banker who goes obsessively deep, and now he’s back at Morgan Stanley right as the IPO window is opening again. ~ learn more

under the microscope 🔬

A large language model for complex cardiology care. “In our RCT, general cardiologists’ clinical assessments aided by AMIE were preferred overall, saved time in 50.5% of cases and had fewer clinically significant errors and fewer omissions of important content.” This Nature Medicine paper tests an LLM assistant on 107 real cardiology cases with multimodal data, then has subspecialists rate the writeups. ~ learn more

Hair remembers toxic history. “back when the regulations were absent, the lead levels were about 100 times higher than they are after the regulations.” University of Utah scientists analyzed hair samples going back to 1916 and watched lead levels collapse after EPA rules phased lead out of gasoline. ~ learn more

on the blockchain ⛓

The messy years matter. Chris Dixon says that the crypto consumer game is a ‘long game’, and patience will pay off. “The messy years are what make the obvious years possible.” Chris Dixon argues we are still in crypto’s financial era, where infrastructure and trust have to come before non-financial apps really show up. ~ learn more

No one wants crypto games. Rival crypto investor Haseeb Qureshi disagrees with Chris Dixon’s take. “Non-financial use cases for crypto have failed because no one wants them. Let’s just admit it. They were bad products. They failed the market test.” Haseeb argues the stuff that actually scaled in crypto was “financial in nature,” while consumer web3 mostly lived in pitch decks and vibes. ~ learn more

Crypto had superglue on the flywheel. Crypto founder Sam Ragsdale backs up argues against Qureshi and takes up Dixon’s case. He says that only now will consumer apps get a fair market test. “Three years ago it was 100% impossible to ship a good consumer crypto experience. Not hard. Not early. Impossible.” Sam Ragsdale argues most “consumer crypto” failures were just brutal UX: seed phrases, blind signing, bridges, and exchange-style onboarding. ~ learn more

thanks for reading!