P.S. You Should Know... | Issue #479

Eurotrip

my story 🚀

🇵🇹 We took our first family trip to Europe since pre-Covid times and it was great! The impetus for the trip was a wedding (Congrats Jeff & Jenn!), and we turned it into a family trip. On the train from Lisbon to Porto I decided, on a whim, to take a practice exam of the Foreign Service Officer Test (FSOT). I guess I just like taking tests. I turned to ChatGPT to help me interpret my score. It said I did well, but then proceeded to dump cold water on me:

The bigger question for actual Foreign Service candidacy would not be intelligence. It would be:

• tolerance for bureaucracy,

• diplomatic restraint,

• institutional patience,

• and willingness to subordinate personal agency to a hierarchy for long stretches.

A lot of people who would dominate the FSOT would hate being Foreign Service Officers.

It seems this would not be the right career path for me!

fun facts 🙌

You have never seen a strawberry like this before. “Shot from 90 perspectives, 88 focus stacked images each.” A strawberry turned into a navigable 3D scene, plus a peek at the capture setup and training pipeline behind it. ~ learn more

‘We mould trees to grow into the shape of chairs’. “At the beginning I thought there would be a two or three-year learning cycle, but it’s more like 12 or 13 years.” Alice and Gavin Munro literally mould living trees into furniture, with “a few dozen” pieces still growing in their orchard. ~ learn more

GPS converts time into distance. “GPS is fundamentally a translation tool: it converts time into distance.” The whole trick is stopwatch-level precision, then geometry, then relativity corrections so your phone does not drift “by roughly 10 km every 24 hours.” ~ learn more

tech, startups, internet ⚡

The Great Differentiation. “Copying is free and frictionless. And because it is cheap, it is low status.” Packy’s take on why everything looks the same online, and why the next wave of differentiation moves into costly signals, often offline. ~ learn more

To be illegible is to disappear. Joumana Elomar argues that in a world of decks, tweets, and LLM summaries, your company “will live or die in rooms you aren’t present in” so the surface has to carry the truth. ~ learn more

The Roomba guy’s second act. “The inventor behind the world-famous robot vacuum is now designing robots that form an emotional bond with their owners.” ~ learn more

better doing 🎯

The Al knowledge work stack. “The title of software engineer is going to start to go away not because engineers aren’t needed but because what was traditionally three roles (engineering, product, design) are going to become a single role.” Taylor Pearson argues agentic AI shrinks the gap between specialists and generalists, and makes integration the scarce skill again. ~ learn more

CS Lewis on the value of reading old books “It is a good rule, after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between.” ~ learn more

to your health ⚕

Hot peptide summer. “San Francisco startups are pushing a hot peptide summer” reads like a joke, but it is the framing for a real wave of peptide-focused wellness companies. If you have been seeing peptides suddenly everywhere, this is the local version of the trend. ~ learn more

What is dry needling and does it work?. “Dry needling targets trigger points, or tight knots of muscle, with the goal of relieving pain and improving range of motion.” The NYT breaks down what it actually is, what the evidence can and cannot claim, and the basic safety checklist before you let someone near your neck or back with a needle. My personal experience with it has been mostly magical. ~ learn more

retail therapy 💸

Why airlines are always going bankrupt. “Airlines are the classic example of an “empty core” industry: an industry that is structurally incapable of reaching competitive equilibrium.” The piece argues that the sector can be profitable or competitive, but not both, which helps explain the endless cycle of price wars, restructuring, and collapse. ~ learn more

thoughts of food 🍔

The creation of instant coffee. “These essences were made by boiling down brewed coffee to concentrate it. This damages the flavor, producing a bitter, unpleasant drink, hence the old saying that ‘coffee boiled is coffee spoiled’.” Instant coffee only became viable once producers found ways to remove water without wrecking the volatile compounds that make coffee taste like coffee. ~ learn more

Protein mania meets math. “Americans, broadly speaking, are in a state of protein mania.” Whey prices are spiking and the USDA says “inventories remain tight,” with some manufacturers already sold out for the year. ~ learn more

big ideas 📚

The world’s most complex objects. “To ship one requires 40 freight containers, three cargo planes, and 20 trucks.” ASML’s EUV lithography machines are basically rolling miracles, and the whole semiconductor industry is bottlenecked on them. ~ learn more

I hired a pro to debunk aliens; it backfired. “When he published, I was shocked by the results. They actually made me slightly more confident in UFOs.” The author hires famed debunker Peter Miller expecting a clean takedown of the Nimitz “tic tac” story, and instead gets nudged deeper into the rabbit hole, right down to ITAR-controlled passive radar. ~ learn more

thanks for reading!