P.S. You Should Know... | Issue #472

Mosquito control

my story 🚀

🏭 I had a bike riding date planned with my daughter, but it ended up a bit too cold for riding. So instead, I took her to the Deep Tech and Hardware Expo, where we saw some companies who are working on hard problems in manufacturing, biotech, robotics, and other frontier technologies. Our favorite thing was the Impulse Labs Stove, which boils a pot of water in ~1 minute. That speeds up “Time to Pasta”, which is a very important metric in our household. Another favorite was Synvect, who have a biotech approach to mosquito control. They sell buckets of GMO male mosquitos that don’t bite, outcompete locals for females, but are sterile so never reproduce. On our date we also had pizza and went to a trampoline park.

fun facts 🙌

The origin of Erewhon. I just learned that the name came from an old science fiction book. “In Erewhon, illness is crime and crime is illness.” Samuel Butler’s 1872 satire flips medicine and morality, with doctors acting more like judges than healers. ~ learn more

You were training Google’s AI. “At peak, 200 million reCAPTCHAs were solved every single day.” Sharbel argues those clicks were free data annotation from people just trying to log in, and that it helped train computer vision for products like Maps and Waymo. ~ learn more

NES Mario in Unreal Engine. “If Nintendo’s NES Super Mario Bros was made with Unreal Engine.” A quick little brain-bender clip that reimagines an 8-bit classic as glossy modern 3D. ~ learn more

oh, austin 🤠

Investigators played poker undercover in Austin. “Agents were given $600 each to play some cards on the first trip.” The warrant says the TABC ran multiple undercover visits, with agents tracking chips, drinks, security, and wins and losses as part of a broader probe into The Lodge’s finances and operations. ~ learn more

tech, startups, internet ⚡

Paul Graham’s on status brands. “Branding isn’t merely orthogonal to good design, but opposed to it.” Paul Graham uses the Swiss watch industry’s quartz crisis to explain how, once performance becomes a commodity, companies learn to sell status and distinctiveness instead. ~ learn more

The 10x lawyer arrives. “This creates, for the first time in the history of the legal profession, the conditions for 10x lawyers.” Zack Shapiro argues AI breaks BigLaw’s leverage model by making individual judgment, not hours or letterhead, the thing clients can finally see and pay for. ~ learn more

Specialized robots, not humanoids. “Humanoids have their place, but there’s a lot of room for specialized robots that do things in an efficient, sort of industrial-scale kind of way, which is sort of where we play,” Kalanick said about his new robotics company, Atoms. He’s also “on the precipice of acquiring Pronto,” an autonomous vehicle startup for industrial and mining sites. ~ learn more

Training a robot to play tennis (with video). “The imperfect human motion data consist only of motion fragments that capture the primitive skills used when playing tennis rather than precise and complete human-tennis motion sequences from real-world tennis matches.” They use these fragments as priors, then correct and compose them into a humanoid policy that can rally with people on a Unitree G1. ~ learn more

better doing 🎯

Ramp down the AI rhetoric. “This is all complete nonsense.” Geohot argues the fear narrative around AI is toxic, and that the real move is to stop playing zero sum status games and “Go create value for others and don’t worry about the returns.” ~ learn more

How Al content detectors work. GPTZero says it “was one of the first AI detectors to pioneer the idea of using ‘perplexity’ and ‘burstiness’ to evaluate writing.” The piece explains why being consistent, typo free, or just writing technical prose can get real humans falsely flagged. ~ learn more

to your health ⚕

Peptides are endogenous signals. “What makes peptides interesting is that they are endogenous signaling molecules and our body naturally produces over 7,000 of them to regulate every major biological system.” Max Marchione responds to Martin Shkreli’s skeptical take by arguing the pharma worldview misses why peptides are getting serious attention now, especially around targets, half-life engineering, and early intervention. This week they’re going to debate on a live stream! ~ learn more

retail therapy 💸

Armpit thumbnails win. “if the thumbnail showed the woman’s armpit that the views would oftentimes 5-10x” A guy ran A/B tests on AI UGC ads and ended up with a weird theory about exposed body language and clicks. ~ learn more

Not a page builder. Bookmarking for the next time I moonlight as a web designer. “Section Store adds sections directly to your existing theme, so you can keep working in Shopify’s native editor.” It’s a marketplace of 700+ Shopify theme sections that you can drop into your store with one click, then tweak in the theme editor. ~ learn more

under the microscope 🔬

Never trust The Science™. “Once you’re savvy to all of this and you get into the habit of reading papers in full (yes, methods and supplementary data too), then these lenses through which the data are distorted become very obvious and you start to see bias everywhere.” A sharp walkthrough of how bias can creep in at every step, from funding and methods to stats and media headlines. ~ learn more

Unlocking a taxpayer-funded dataset. “Microfiche is so old that most of you don’t even know what it is.” Cremieux Recueil digitized and organized the National Collaborative Perinatal Project, a 60,000 pregnancy cohort that was effectively trapped in film scans, and put it online so people can actually use it. ~ learn more

big ideas 📚

The ocean becomes the construction crew. “AI-optimized underwater structures grew more than 90 feet of new beach in six months, not by pumping sand or pouring concrete, but by programming the ocean to deposit it.” The idea is to use engineered porous structures that redirect sediment so the shoreline grows, plus an “intelligence layer” that picks sites from satellite imagery. ~ learn more

thanks for reading!