P.S. You Should Know... | Issue #468
Digging or watching?
my story 🚀
🚧 I attempted to explain to my kids today why there was 1 worker digging a hole while 4 workers watched him. I did not succeed. I’d say the most reasonable part of my answer was that there wasn’t enough room for all of them to be in the hole. In any case, I think we should all celebrate those who are digging!
fun facts 🙌
Iceland: Where one in 10 people will publish a book. “There is a phrase in Icelandic, “ad ganga med bok I maganum”, everyone gives birth to a book.” Iceland has 300,000 people, and “One in 10 Icelanders will publish one.” ~ learn more
Ice made modern cities possible. “On the morning of February 13th, 1806, Tudor departed Boston Harbor, carrying with him over 80 metric tonnes of ice, the first shipment of its kind. The Boston Gazette ran an article that read, “No joke. A vessel has cleared at the Custom House with a cargo of ice. We hope this will not prove a slippery speculation.” After nearly three weeks at sea, Tudor’s ship arrived, and to his relief, around half of the ice had survived the trip.” ~ learn more
Blue photons ricochet around. “But blue photons have a tendency to ricochet around a lot.” They get dispersed throughout the atmosphere, so on a clear afternoon you can look almost anywhere and still get blue light coming straight into your eyes. ~ learn more
oh, chicago 🏆
A CTA world record. “Despite the well-chronicled chaos, the group became the official Guinness World Record holders when the men hit every ‘L’ stop in 8 hours, 58 minutes and 55 seconds on Nov. 10.” A Chicago trio pulled it off through snowstorms and breakdowns, and they are already eyeing bigger transit systems next. ~ learn more
oh, austin 🤠
Is there not a single reasonable person in charge over here? “In 2023, Austin police did $23k in damage to an innocent house while SWAT raided the neighbor.” The city refused to pay, and now wants approval to hire an outside law firm for “$600k to defend city.” ~ learn more
tech, startups, internet ⚡
The Anthropic hive mind. “Anthropic is unusually impenetrable as a company. Employees there all know they just need to keep their mouths shut and heads down and they’ll be billionaires and beyond, so they have lots of incentive to do exactly that. … But I managed. … By talking to enough of them, and getting their perspectives in long conversations, I have begun to suspect that the future of software development is the Hive Mind.” ~ learn more
Automate the entire company. “One of our goals for the year is to automate the entire company. If we all go on vacation at the end of the year, the company should, in many ways, keep running without us.” A VC shares how quickly this idea went from delusional to plausible, with concrete examples like agents running experiments, monitoring training runs, and even drafting sales outreach. ~ learn more
People want AI to do things. “The pattern across all 3,000 skills is clear. People don’t want to talk with AI. They want AI to do things for them.” Someone scraped 3,000+ OpenClaw “skills” and treated it like a revealed-preferences dataset for what people actually want agents to handle, like email, morning briefings, and dev task queues. ~ learn more
Sequencing is a commodity. “Sequencing has become a commodity, like a bag of flour or a gallon of gas — everyone likes cheaper commodities.” A San Diego startup called Element claims its new VITARI device can deliver a whole genome for $100, aiming to undercut Illumina’s $200 benchmark and make bigger studies feasible. ~ learn more
better doing 🎯
Bundled tasks hide AI gains. “If you’re half as productive at debugging code you didn’t write, or less, the LLM saves you no time at all.” Philip Trammell’s point: automating one slice of a job can break the feedback loop that made you fast at the other slice, so the time savings look disappointingly small until you automate more of the whole workflow. ~ learn more
The sports marketing measurement playbook. “L5 is the land of Big Numbers. They look very impressive on slide decks (”450m IMPRESSIONS”). At this level, you are measuring activity, not outcomes.” Avinash Kaushik lays out a 5-level playbook for sports marketing measurement, starting with vanity metrics and climbing toward causality and real business impact. ~ learn more
to your health ⚕
The golden age of vaccine development. “The first vaccine was a lucky accident. Now we can design new vaccines in weeks, atom by atom.” Let’s remember just how lucky we are to have advanced so far with technology: “Stocks of Jenner’s [smallpox] vaccine would die out repeatedly, and needed to be rederived from scratch many times.” Keeping a vaccine going in the 1800s could mean literal “arm to arm chains of transmission” just to preserve the material. ~ learn more
Regulatory roulette at the FDA. “In context, this looks like the regulatory rules of the game are being changed retroactively.” Moderna ran a 43,000 person Phase 3 trial based on FDA guidance, then got hit with a rare Refusal-to-File letter anyway, and now says it will stop funding new Phase 3 vaccine trials for infectious diseases. Crazy FDA antics. But also, Moderna saying they can’t make money on vaccines without the US market seems like an unreasonable situation. ~ learn more
retail therapy 💸
Ring just showed the surveillance future. “a world where biometric identification could be unleashed from consumer devices to identify, track, and locate anything — human, pet, and otherwise.” Amazon pitched “Search Party” as lost-dog reunions, but the ad also made it easy to imagine a neighborhood-wide surveillance dragnet built out of doorbells. ~ learn more
China’s doing more on AI disclosure, but also not that much. “China is essentially the only major country to enact a preemptive, upstream requirement that all AI-generated video be labeled, watermarked, and traceable across the stack.” The piece explains why that ambitious framework still looks shaky in practice, right as Seedance and Kling clips go viral. ~ learn more
big ideas 📚
The final offshoring. “A likely future in which physical labor is commoditized, featuring robot holidays, fashion, futures markets, reshoring (ironically enough), geopolitical instability, sovereign wealth funds, and the bifurcation of everything.” This essay is trying to think all the way through what happens after robots get cheap and capable enough to feel like offshoring, but for atoms. ~ learn more