P.S. You Should Know... | Issue #483
DJ Party
my story 🚀
🎛️ I was in Chicago for a happy hour meeting when a friend suggested I swing by the Lakeshore Arts & Music Festival because he had an extra ticket. It was right next to Lake Michigan at Diversey Harbor. One thing led to another and we’re hanging out on stage at this high energy EDM party. I’m lucky to have such fun friends! It seems the festival was too much of a rager and will not be invited back next year.
fun facts 🙌
Reconciling whether money buys happiness. “The plateau is not in your bank account. It is in your attention.” Two famous findings about money and happiness turned out to both be right, but for different groups: for the happiest 70 percent, income kept rising with happiness, while for the unhappiest 20 percent it flattened around $100k. The top comment on this post makes fun of it failing AI-detector Pangram test, yet I think the content is good, so whatever. ~ learn more
Apple’s magic dots. “It sounds preposterous, but I’m here to tell you that it actually works.” Apple’s Vehicle Motion Cues put little dots on the edge of the screen that move with the car, so your eyes and inner ear stop disagreeing. I plan to test this out over the coming week! ~ learn more
oh, chicago 🏆
It’s a monsoon. Austin Berg covers the state’s newly passed crypto tax and argues it’s just the beginning. “To an average person, a 0.2% tax seems minuscule. But to Chicago businesses built on facilitating billions of financial transactions using modern technology, it is a monsoon.” ~ learn more
oh, austin 🤠
Two people armed with knives meet on South Lamar — one survives. APD says the stabbing was believed to be self-defense, after the woman reported she’d been attacked and the other person later died at the scene. ~ learn more
tech, startups, internet ⚡
Scaling compute on your context. “We’re building AI that learns from you and deeply understands your work.” Engram is pitching a different axis of progress: not just bigger models, but more compute spent on your own context so the system can actually track what you do day to day. Backed by Andrej Karpathy! ~ learn more
When fintechs fail, it’s a cash grab. “Patriot unilaterally, and without permission, swept approximately $5.2 million from Parker Group’s accounts at Patriot,” SVB alleges, in a fight over who owns about $21M in Parker card receivables after the fintech collapsed into Chapter 7. The whole story is a fast tour of how charge card receivables, warehouse lines, and a last-minute collateral tweak can unravel. ~ learn more
1,000 data breaches later. Troy Hunt writes “Today, I loaded the 1,000th data breach into Have I Been Pwned.” Then he laments that disclosures around breaches are getting worse, not better. ~ learn more
better doing 🎯
A lever made of agents. Taylor Pearson connects a lot of my favorite dots in this post about the future of business operating leverage. From the 7 Powers and E-Myth and EOS all the way to the cutting edge of Agentic workflows, this is a worthwhile read. “The durable leverage in this architecture for most businesses lives in the local scaffolding layer: what sits on top of the harness, pulls context from your other services, and tells the agent how your work works.” ~ learn more
to your health ⚕
Get yourself some fake sun. “SAD lamps and red light devices use visible light and do not activate UVB-responsive biological pathways that are fundamental to health and longevity,” says Solius Labs CEO Chris Kiple. The FDA just cleared Solius Pro as the first over-the-counter home UVB panel meant to stimulate vitamin D production in adults 22+. ~ learn more
under the microscope 🔬
Fast iteration beats slow bureaucracy. “The most valuable thing early-stage trials enable is iteration.” The piece argues the US is finally trying to speed Phase I trials, partly because China has built a structural advantage by running them quickly and at scale. ~ learn more
thoughts of food 🍔
Industrializing fish harvesting then vertically integrating. Ike jime is a Japanese technique for euthanizing fish so they don’t thrash before death, which has the extra benefit of preserving flavor. Shinkei is building Poseidon robots that do ike jime at scale, aiming to lock in freshness and cut waste when “two-thirds of all fish harvested never make it to a plate.” Then they took it one step further: “To bring Poseidon-processed fish to market, we launched Seremoni - the consumer-facing distribution arm of Shinkei. A new philosophy and standard for the very best fish.” ~ learn more
big ideas 📚
Ending respiratory infections. I have been whining for years about the missing cure for the common cold that I’d pay dearly for. A new $500 million fund called Intercept is here to attack the problem. “Healthy people spend roughly 15-25 days each year, about 5% of their lives, sick with respiratory infections like the common cold and influenza.” Intercept argues we could make respiratory viruses rarer the way we did with cholera and typhoid, by combining broad-spectrum preventatives with air cleaning tech. ~ learn more
SpaceX and the sentient Sun. Marc Andreessen writes at length of the fantastic mission that Elon Musk is undertaking. “Elon Musk’s compensation package at SpaceX is structured around two targets. The first award vests if the company reaches a valuation of $7.5 trillion and establishes a permanent human colony on Mars of at least one million people. The second vests if SpaceX operates data centers in space that draw at least 100 terawatts of power, more than 1,000x the consumption of every data center on Earth combined. Miss both, and Musk earns nothing but the $54,080 salary he has been paid since 2019.” ~ learn more
Cutting power to your nuclear reactor on purpose. “We designed this reactor to be inherently and intrinsically safe, also called “walk-away” safe.” Valar Atomics says they are intentionally triggering a SCRAM, then cutting forced cooling and simulating total electrical failure to show the Ward 250 can shed decay heat passively. There’s a video of it which is predictably (and happily) anti-climactic. ~ learn more