P.S. You Should Know... | Issue #471
Apres
my story đ
â·ïž After a full day on the mountain at Deer Valley in Utah, we made it into the crazy apres-ski party tent at the St. Regis. What a time to be alive!
fun facts đ
That took a while to build. âAlmost a century and a half after construction began on La Sagrada Familia, the exterior structure of the tallest church in the world was finally completed last Friday in Barcelona, Spain.â The tower of Jesus Christ is now topped with a âroughly 56-ft (17-m) tall crossâ designed to âshine day and night.â ~ learn more
Cash fell from the sky. âJust today, everyone refused to take my money five times.â A cargo plane crash scattered $62 million in newly printed Bolivian currency, then the central bank voided the serial numbers, so nobody knows what cash is spendable anymore. ~ learn more
Does that use a lot of energy? This lovely interactive tool allows you to create a chart comparing the energy use of many common activities, including driving a gas car, operating a gas lawnmower, streaming on Netflix, and of course querying an LLM. ~ learn more
Is it war? âWhen America sends missiles and tanks into a sovereign country, is it war? Letâs find out on Americaâs longest, most depressing game show!â Sadly funny. ~ learn more
oh, chicago đ
No payments for three years. Chicago got hit with two credit downgrades, then the Tribune editorial board surfaced a new plan for ~ $500M in borrowing that pushes the bill onto whoever comes into office next. âThe city is structuring this debt so it doesnât have to make payments for the next three-plus years.â ~ learn more
oh, austin đ€
Austinites are not native Texans. âA slight majority of Austinites are not native Texans.â A fun reset for the usual Austin stereotypes, pulled from a city demographerâs slide deck on population trends. ~ learn more
tech, startups, internet âĄ
Googleâs patent to replace your website with an AI page. âGoogle would use AI to generate a page that looks like your website but rebuilds the entire structure of a page dynamically, in real time, and places it at the top of the SERP.â The piece walks through a newly granted Google patent describing AI-generated pages assembled from a userâs query history, account context, and performance data, potentially even inside ads. ~ learn more
A fly brain in the matrix, but slow down the hype train. There was a popular demo this week, âThe First Multi-Behavior Brain Uploadâ where a fly connectome (every neuron, mapped) was put into a simulated environment and it started doing fly things on its own. This link is to a reaction. âWeâve had the connectome of the worm for over 30 years now, and we still canât reliably simulate a virtual worm.â Dan Turner-Evans explains what connectomes still miss, like âneuromodulator or neuropeptide release sites or receptors,â and why that matters for whole brain simulation. ~ learn more
How I dropped our production database. âThe agentâs answer was simple and terrifying at the same time: Terraform believed nothing existed.â One missing state file turned a routine migration into a full production wipe, including snapshots, and a 24-hour recovery with AWS support. ~ learn more
The five levels of AI coding. âLevel 2, and every level after it, feels like you are done. But you are not done.â Dan Shapiro lays out five tiers of AI coding, from spicy autocomplete to a dark factory that turns specs into software. ~ learn more
to your health â
Magic mushrooms for longevity. âI think magic mushrooms are a longevity therapy.â Bryan Johnson shares his n=1 data from two psilocybin doses, claiming âmulti-system improvementsâ even with biomarkers already âin the 99th percentile optimal.â ~ learn more
under the microscope đŹ
Batteries that sweat. âWe asked ourselves: can we translate this âsweating + evaporationâ principle into high-power device/battery thermal management in a controlled, engineering-friendly way?â A Hong Kong team built a wraparound membrane that absorbs moisture when cool, then evaporates it when hot, cutting temps and extending cycle life in tests. ~ learn more
10,000 year data storage advance. "Scientists at Microsoft use accelerated ageing tests, in which they âbakeâ the glass at extremely high temperatures to simulate the passing of thousands of years." The idea is simple: use a femtosecond laser to write permanent 3D "voxels" inside borosilicate glass, then machine learning reads it back and corrects errors. ~ learn more
thoughts of food đ
David Bar drama. David Protein, the bar built on a high protein low calorie nutrition claim, has been slapped with a lawsuit claiming itâs higher-calorie and higher-fat than labeled. It all comes down to which testing methodology is appropriate for the ingredients. Founder Peter Rahalâs response seems like a good one to me. Also, these are probably the farthest thing one can find from âwhole, unprocessed foodsâ. Therefore, the nutrition facts label claims really are the most important part of the marketing, so they better be right! ~ learn more
teaching the kids đ©âđ«
No, you donât get an A for effort. âMy grade doesnât reflect the effort I put into this course.â An increasing number of students believe their effort should impact their grades, a shift from traditional views prioritizing excellence. This reflects a widespread misinterpretation of educational theories emphasizing effort over innate talent. ~ learn more
College English majors canât read. â58 percent (49 of 85 subjects) understood so little of the introduction to [Charles Dickensâ] Bleak House that they would not be able to read the novel on their own.â The piece walks through a study of English majors reading Dickens aloud, and the transcripts are painful in a very specific way: they cannot reliably tell literal from figurative language. ~ learn more
profiles of people đ¶
Tech legend Stewart Brand. âMaintenance is what keeps everything going. Itâs what keeps life going.â Stewart Brandâs new project is a 13-part book series about the hidden work that makes everything from rifles to institutions last. ~ learn more



I like that link about Dickens ;)