P.S. You Should Know... | Issue #471

Apres

my story 🚀

⛷️ 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 🙌

That took a while to build. “Almost 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.” The tower of Jesus Christ is now topped with a “roughly 56-ft (17-m) tall cross” designed to “shine day and night.” ~ learn more

Cash fell from the sky. “Just today, everyone refused to take my money five times.” 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? “When America sends missiles and tanks into a sovereign country, is it war? Let’s find out on America’s longest, most depressing game show!” Sadly funny. ~ learn more

oh, chicago 🏆

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. “The city is structuring this debt so it doesn’t have to make payments for the next three-plus years.” ~ learn more

oh, austin 🤠

Austinites are not native Texans. “A slight majority of Austinites are not native Texans.” A fun reset for the usual Austin stereotypes, pulled from a city demographer’s slide deck on population trends. ~ learn more

tech, startups, internet ⚡

Google’s patent to replace your website with an AI page. “Google 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.” The piece walks through a newly granted Google patent describing AI-generated pages assembled from a user’s 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, “The First Multi-Behavior Brain Upload” 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. “We’ve had the connectome of the worm for over 30 years now, and we still can’t reliably simulate a virtual worm.” Dan Turner-Evans explains what connectomes still miss, like “neuromodulator or neuropeptide release sites or receptors,” and why that matters for whole brain simulation. ~ learn more

How I dropped our production database. “The agent’s answer was simple and terrifying at the same time: Terraform believed nothing existed.” 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. “Level 2, and every level after it, feels like you are done. But you are not done.” 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 ⚕

Magic mushrooms for longevity. “I think magic mushrooms are a longevity therapy.” Bryan Johnson shares his n=1 data from two psilocybin doses, claiming “multi-system improvements” even with biomarkers already “in the 99th percentile optimal.” ~ learn more

under the microscope 🔬

Batteries that sweat. “We asked ourselves: can we translate this ‘sweating + evaporation’ principle into high-power device/battery thermal management in a controlled, engineering-friendly way?” 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 ‘bake’ 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 🍔

David Bar drama. David Protein, the bar built on a high protein low calorie nutrition claim, has been slapped with a lawsuit claiming it’s higher-calorie and higher-fat than labeled. It all comes down to which testing methodology is appropriate for the ingredients. Founder Peter Rahal’s response seems like a good one to me. Also, these are probably the farthest thing one can find from ‘whole, unprocessed foods’. 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 👩‍🏫

No, you don’t get an A for effort. “My grade doesn’t reflect the effort I put into this course.” 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 can’t read. “58 percent (49 of 85 subjects) understood so little of the introduction to [Charles Dickens’] Bleak House that they would not be able to read the novel on their own.” 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 🚶

Tech legend Stewart Brand. “Maintenance is what keeps everything going. It’s what keeps life going.” Stewart Brand’s new project is a 13-part book series about the hidden work that makes everything from rifles to institutions last. ~ learn more

thanks for reading!