P.S. You Should Know... | Issue #474
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my story 🚀
🎯 I hit many of the clay pigeons but merely scared the “rabbits” that roll on the ground.
fun facts 🙌
Helium is hard to replace. “Liquid helium boils at just 4.2 kelvin (-452 degrees Fahrenheit).” If you need temperatures a few degrees above absolute zero, the article argues helium is basically the only practical coolant, which is why shortages hit MRI and chipmaking so hard. ~ learn more
Choppelganger. A new word, “a less attractive or worse version of something or someone.” Next time someone tells me I look like someone they know, I will bust this one out. ~ learn more
Autonomous cars are going to clog the roads. “Autonomous vehicles are the centrifugal water pump of the roads.” The piece argues that self-driving will make traffic tolerable enough to overuse, unless we start charging for road access before AVs become the default. ~ learn more
Swappy. “Use your wits to get every character to their goal! Each stage has a tricky layout that can be overcome by using the character’s swapping powers. Whenever two characters are in the same row or column, their places can be swapped!” ~ learn more
oh, austin 🤠
A train derailed in downtown Austin. The tracks are near my house and we were alerted to this by a text from our school district. While it’s a 230-car cargo train that derailed in downtown Austin around 4:45 a.m., it seems like only a few cars were off the track and nobody was hurt. I guess the conductors will drive even slower in the future? ~ learn more
How Austin got its professional soccer team. Eddie Margain talks about what it feels like when rule of law breaks down (“I fled [Mexico] when the cartels threatened my family”), and how he later poured that urgency into building Austin FC and investing in Austin. ~ learn more
tech, startups, internet ⚡
Brain interface that knows 96 milliseconds early. “A new type of non-invasive brain-computer interface that knows what you will do 96 milliseconds before you do it.” BRILL Neurotech and UIUC’s CNL built it by “hacking 25-year-old equipment.” ~ learn more
Patents may get narrower. If AI becomes part of the “person having ordinary skill in the art,” more things start to look obvious in hindsight, and today’s portfolios might age badly in court. “The net effect could be that the claims that survive legal challenges get narrower as time goes by.” ~ learn more
250 documents can backdoor a model. “Only 250 malicious documents roughly 420 thousand tokens or just 0.00016 percent of a large dataset are enough.” Roemmele argues this kind of data poisoning gets “permanently embedded in the model weights” and the only fix is retraining from scratch. ~ learn more
Not consistently candid. “They were not consistently candid in their communications,” Dylan Field said about Anthropic, just days after it launched Claude Design and after Mike Krieger resigned from Figma’s board. Also, Claude Design is quite impressive and allows me to shore up a major personal weakness. Onward! ~ learn more
to your health ⚕
Startup promoting health via a daily inhaler. I heard of someone developing for this form factor last year, and I think this is not them, which means there are going to be several DTC inhalers coming to market! “One inhale each morning, in under 30 seconds.” Climatic Health is pitching L Max as a daily, inhaled, all-natural formula with “targeted lung delivery” via a purpose-built device. ~ learn more
Sprinkle your vitamins. “We have invented a world first oral delivery format that is designed to be sprinkled on meals!” Dr Glitter makes “nutrient crystals” that are “tasteless, odourless” and meant to go on your food instead of downing big pills. ~ learn more
retail therapy 💸
The internet is real life now. “Have you spoken to a normal person recently? They aren’t actually normal anymore. Nobody is. In all aspects of American life, the internet is upstream of everything else. Sooner or later (and, more often than not, sooner) everyone ends up thinking, speaking, and acting on terms that have been set online. The internet is real life.” ~ learn more
Peptides are going legal. “Whenever a government tries to ban something people actually want, the same sequence of events plays out every time.” Max Marchione argues the FDA’s peptide crackdown mostly pushed supply into sketchier channels, and that the reversal will remake the market, from clinics to supply chains. ~ learn more
profiles of people 🚶
Reluctantly influential: Lenny Rachitsky. “I have a rule: no meetings before 3pm,” Rachitsky says. It’s part of how he protects a “chill life” while still shipping an absurd amount of content and community work. ~ learn more
Fei-Fei Li, the godmother of AI. “AI is absolutely a civilizational technology. I define civilizational technology in the sense that, because of the power of this technology, it’ll have—or [is] already having—a profound impact in the economic, social, cultural, political, downstream effects of our society.” Dr. Li talks with Tim Ferris about how AI is shaping the world across various dimensions and urges us to recognize its ongoing influence. ~ learn more