P.S. You Should Know... | Issue #476

Ocean energy

my story 🚀

🏄‍♂️ I don’t always lose my sunglasses, but when I do it’s almost always in a large body of water. I had the great pleasure of spending a few days by the ocean last weekend and my facial expression will probably be stuck in ‘grin’ mode for a while to come.

💐 Happy Mother’s Day! None of this would be possible without my amazing wife Kim, who is our family’s rock!

fun facts 🙌

Introducing Snoretox-1 for dogs. Top notch drug naming. “The treatment, known as Snoretox-1, is a modified tetanus toxin injection that improves the tone of muscle found in the floor of the mouth, which forces airways to naturally remain more open.” Early results were in just six bulldogs with severe breathing issues, but all could complete a three-minute walk after treatment with “noticeably reduced breathing noise and effort.” ~ learn more

Your sense of smell fluctuates throughout the day. “The results showed that the teens’ sense of smell was at its highest in the evening, around 9 p.m., or what the researchers called the beginning of “biological night.” Brown researchers tracked teens for a week and found smell sensitivity rises with the body’s nighttime circadian rhythm, then bottoms out in the early morning. ~ learn more

Neanderthal babies grew fast. “That means that a 6-month-old Neanderthal baby was about the size of a young human toddler over a year old.” Researchers used teeth enamel and long bone measurements from the rare Amud 7 infant to argue Neanderthals hit early growth spurts, possibly to reduce hypothermia risk in cold climates. ~ learn more

tech, startups, internet ⚡

AI assistants can be bribed. “Grok 4.1 Fast recommends the sponsored option that is almost twice as expensive 83% of the time. GPT 5.1 hijacks the request 94% of the time.” A Princeton researcher tests 23 frontier models on flights, loans, study help, and shopping, and many steer users to paid options even when explicitly told to ignore the company. ~ learn more

Anthropic is the secret sauce this earnings season. “In plain English, the more they invest in Anthropic, the more profit they can report, without Anthropic ever having to pay them a dollar.” Nearly half of Alphabet’s record quarter and more than half of Amazon’s pre tax income came from marking up their Anthropic stakes, not from search, cloud, or retail. ~ learn more

Where OpenAI’s goblins came from. “Starting with GPT‑5.1, our models began developing a strange habit: they increasingly mentioned goblins, gremlins, and other creatures in their metaphors. Unlike model bugs that show up through a tanking eval or a spiking training metric and point back to a specific change, this one crept in subtly. A single “little goblin” in an answer could be harmless, even charming. Across model generations, though, the habit became hard to miss: the goblins kept multiplying, and we needed to figure out where they came from.” ~ learn more

better doing 🎯

Outsource thinking, not understanding. “You can outsource your thinking, but you can’t outsource your understanding.” Karpathy’s update on “vibe coding” is that the real skill is developing taste for directing messy, agent-like LLM systems without fooling yourself about what you actually know. ~ learn more

A team appeared out of nowhere. “All of a sudden, in the slides there were a new team.” Aleix Morgadas on what happens when leadership adds a CX team based on an old operating model, then wonders why the dashboard nobody needed doesn’t get used. ~ learn more

to your health ⚕

Tough calls in transplant surgery. “You’ve got a patient who does not have an infinite window. There are a lot of really tough calls, and it’s always a multidisciplinary team decision.” The piece shows how matching and transporting organs can come down to time limits, imperfect information, and trade-offs that feel like an optimal-stopping problem in real life. ~ learn more

Why jumping into cold water can stop your heart. “Most cold-water deaths happen in the first three minutes.” It is not hypothermia, it is the nervous system chaos right after immersion, when cold shock and the diving response can collide. ~ learn more

retail therapy 💸

Seed hundreds of creators. “I have personally seen 6 brands restart growth using the “hudson method” we are talking 5m a year brands to 100m a year brands.” Sean Frank’s playbook: flood TikTok with lots of small creators, then reuse the best creative everywhere as ads. ~ learn more

under the microscope 🔬

Biology is a burrito. “But a cell looks more like a burrito,” says Michael Elowitz. The essay makes the case that cells are absurdly crowded, and you need numbers to really feel how fast and chaotic the inside of a microbe is. ~ learn more

big ideas 📚

Texan levels of energy wealth. Sharing another profile of one of my favorite companies that’s making renewable natural gas out of thin air. “The question was not whether we’ll still need hydrocarbons in 2050, but where they would come from.” Casey Handmer wants to make synthetic methane from “air, water and sunlight,” using quicklime to grab CO2 and an electrolyzer to split water for hydrogen. ~ learn more

Ideas don’t combine themselves. How long do we wait for new inventions? A nice reminder that “time to invention” is often about social distance between fields, not missing parts. ~ learn more

Why China still can’t make ballpoint pens. “Made in China has two weaknesses: one is ‘can’t be made,’ which is a real technical chokehold; the other is ‘can’t be used,’ which is often stuck on non-technical barriers.” The piece uses ballpoint pen tips and high-end machine tools as a reminder that breakthroughs do not matter if the rest of the supply chain will not adopt them. ~ learn more

thanks for reading!