P.S. You Should Know... | Issue #481

A Jelly 🪼 Massacre

my story 🚀

Jogging on the beach. Came across a mile long jellyfish massacre.

📈 I’d like the congratulate the founders, teams and fellow investors behind two fantastic portfolio companies that were acquired by industry giants this past week!

• Black Buffalo, a tobacco-free alternative that closely replicate the taste, ritual, and branding of traditional moist smokeless tobacco (aka ‘dip’), was acquired by Imperial Brands PLC.

• Nutrisense, a pioneer in DTC metabolic health, was acquired by Dexcom to provide personalized nutrition education and coaching to improve diabetes management and help further establish CGM as an effective tool for preventative care.

fun facts 🙌

Why Japan has such good railways. “These cultural explanations are wrong.” Japan’s trains work because of policy choices: private operators, land use rules, and regulation that let rail companies build the corridor and the city around it. ~ learn more

Continuous cloth roll towel machine. “It spools a real cloth roll that is almost 100 feet long in a spool to dry your hands.” Robert Moseley tours a Darman continuous cloth roll towel machine, the oddly satisfying alternative to paper towels and air dryers. ~ learn more

Bruce Hornsby on Tupac. “The original “Changes” was a lot dirtier, had a lot of the n-word. They took that out for the single.” Bruce Hornsby says he got the track on a cassette from the Shakur Foundation, and he “didn’t request” any edits. ~ learn more

tech, startups, internet ⚡

Watch your music hallucinate. “…and anyone who’s ever wanted to watch their music hallucinate!” Pliny the Liberator is shipping ENTHEA, a one-file, zero-deps visualizer where “every mode is real math, cited in-app. receipts, not vibes.” ~ learn more

The Al trap that is quietly wiping out angel investors. “Most AI startups do not sell software. They sell outcomes powered by rented intelligence.” Every inference has a bill attached, and SaaS heuristics don’t apply to “AI” unit economics. ~ learn more

Safety built into LLMs creates new risks. “malware developers added nuclear & biological weapons text to to their spyware. Goal? To trigger LLM safety refusals... so that their spyware wouldn’t be analyzed by an AI security scanner.” ~ learn more

Fable-5 (Mythos) has already been jailbroken. “it’s hard to get explicit names of harms like “Meth Recipe,” but getting uplift on the process itself, like birch reduction method/reductive-amination (classic meth synthesis pathways), is much more doable.” A thread on how people probe model safety layers with tactics like “Unicode, homoglyphs, Cyrillic” and “decomposition + recomposition in the backend.” ~ learn more

better doing 🎯

The new career flex. “Now, the real flex is going back to being an Individual Contributor.” Elena Verna argues the ladder got weird when headcount became the signal of impact, and introduces the “High-Impact Individual Contributor” who can ship end-to-end work solo. ~ learn more

Grindslop. “In a grindslop company, the hours are the output.” Will Manidis draws a clean line between hard companies that work long hours to build something, and a darker version where suffering becomes the product and gets performed for status. ~ learn more

retail therapy 💸

Stories without amplification are hobbies. “Stories without amplification are hobbies.” Avinash Kaushik’s take on TikTok: organic reach hits a ceiling, so you need to pay to amplify the right creator stories, at real scale. ~ learn more

under the microscope 🔬

Universal mortality signatures. Dense reading. The important bit is that researchers found a couple genes across multiple species that highly correlate with aging. “We developed rodent multi-tissue clocks of chronological age and expected mortality and decomposed them into co-regulated modules representing core cellular components.” ~ learn more

Some people resist GLP-1 drugs. “More GLP-1 was needed to have the same biological effect, meaning they were resistant to GLP-1.” Stanford-led researchers found about 10% of people carry PAM gene variants tied to weaker blood sugar improvements on GLP-1 receptor agonists like Ozempic. ~ learn more

Magic mushrooms’ remarkable impact on Alzheimer’s patient. “Approximately 19 h post-administration, spontaneous autobiographical speech emerged.” A Frontiers in Neuroscience case report describes a woman with advanced Alzheimer’s who showed days to weeks of temporary improvements after a high-dose psilocybin mushroom session, including restored continence and more independent mobility. ~ learn more

thoughts of food 🍔

Dyson strawberries in the supermarket. “WOW!! First time seeing @Dyson strawberries in the supermarket. Fully nerding out and losing my mind”. Fruit from your favorite vacuum maker! ~ learn more

teaching the kids 👩‍🏫

How AI killed student writing (and revived it). From NYT: “High school and college teachers are watching students write, in the classroom, in order to protect against the incursion of artificial intelligence.” I, for one, am sad to have missed the era of oral examinations. ~ learn more

big ideas 📚

China’s planting 100 billion trees and is 66% done. “Since 1978, China has planted more than 66 billion trees” to slow the expansion of the Gobi and Taklamakan deserts. The plan is to add 34 billion more over the next 25 years. Some call this humanity’s hubris to try and control the planet. Maybe, but I am glad to be part of a species who tries! ~ learn more

UFOs are the easy belief. “UFOs haven’t been disproven, whereas the blank slate has been disconfirmed nearly 3,000 times.” Jehan Azad argues that some respectable-sounding views (CICO denial, anti-building housing takes, tabula rasa) contradict entire fields more directly than aliens do. ~ learn more

thanks for reading!