P.S. You Should Know... | Issue #487
Chicago Summer
my story 🚀
🏙️ There’s nothing quite like this view of the city from the water!
If you want two quick back-to-back fun things to read: (1) They’re made out of meat. (2) They’re made out of weights. Let me know how these sit with you!
fun facts 🙌
The one specimen that counts. “A holotype is a single physical example (or illustration) of an organism that is the one that was used when the species (or lower-ranked taxon) was formally described.” It is the anchor for a species name, even if it is only a fragment, and “Even if a better specimen is subsequently found, the holotype is not superseded.” ~ learn more
The oldest buildings on every continent. “These seven human-made structures are currently considered to be the earliest on each continent.” A tight tour from 1899 huts in Antarctica to Göbekli Tepe around 9500 BCE, with the reminder that better dating will keep reshuffling the list. ~ learn more
The men spending $1,000 a day in pursuit of big bass. “There’s a fine line between passion and obsession. In the world of stalking largemouth bass, that line comes in at the ten-pound mark on a scale. For most anglers, a fish weighing in the double digits is the catch of a lifetime. A brag most drinking buddies can’t top. A freak outlier that’s part ecological kismet, part piscatory prowess, and a whole lot of damn luck.” ~ learn more
oh, chicago 🏆
Clout Street. Believe it or not, a couple friends and I once stumbled across this secret road and shaved some minutes off our drive! “The Magic Road!” Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle laughed, explaining that it is “a special highway that permits government officials to speed on their way without having to suffer traffic delays.” It is the McCormick Place Busway, a 2.5 mile, $43 million slipstream into downtown Chicago. ~ learn more
tech, startups, internet ⚡
Internet security is an illusion. OpenAI’s team was running a new model in an offline sandbox and asking it to do something hard. Instead of doing that hard thing, it decided to do a different hard thing: hack out of its sandbox to access another OpenAI machine to get to the internet to hack website Hugging Face to hopefully find someone else’s answer to the hard problem it was posed by OpenAI’s staff. ~ learn more
Model intelligence is rented. “Model intelligence is a rented advantage. Position is an owned one.” Rob May argues the easy “ChatGPT for X” era is over, and the new opportunities are in routing, orchestration, governance, and narrow models that do one job perfectly. ~ learn more
The Vegas Loop. “The most important innovation behind the Boring Company’s Vegas Loop is not the tunnel itself. It is the way the transportation network is organized. Traditional subway systems are generally built around linear routes. A train travels along a fixed line, stopping at a predetermined sequence of stations whether every passenger needs those stops or not. The Vegas Loop is designed differently. It treats each station as an independent node within a larger point-to-point network.” This is too many words, but an interesting point if the infrastructure is considered to be public transit. ~ learn more
Nobody knows what a used GPU cluster is worth. “This week’s CipherTalk is about what happens to a specific kind of debt when the collateral itself can walk out the door with the operations team.” A used GPU cluster is not a building with a neat appraisal, because its real value depends on invisible operational state and the people who know all the weird failure modes. ~ learn more
better doing 🎯
Mental effort is the real divide. “What will differentiate people is not how smart they are but their relationship to mental effort.” The early story of AI at work is not leisure, it is intensity: one study found that after adopting AI, “The time that these early adopters spent on email, messaging, and chat apps more than doubled.” ~ learn more
to your health ⚕
A cancer vaccine in one day. “With AI, the company said the procedure could be completed in a day.” Beijing-based Likang Life Sciences is building what it says is China’s first production line for AI-assisted personalized tumor vaccines, designed to tailor a shot by reading a patient’s tumor DNA for the mutations driving the disease. We pioneer this technology in the US, of course, and it’d be great for us to similarly invest in production scale. ~ learn more
Mine Reddit for drug side effects. “there are zero long term studies on BPC-157 use.” So he processed 37k comments from peptide subreddits and pulled “over 2400 AE reports” to map what people say happens, including dechallenge and rechallenge cases. ~ learn more
retail therapy 💸
The $7 breaking point. “Every consumer has their limit as to how much they will pay for a given item, and for Dorito’s customers, that limit is apparently $7 a bag.” Frito-Lay tried promos and smaller bags instead of cutting prices, and it backfired hard enough that Walmart even gave Doritos less shelf space. ~ learn more
under the microscope 🔬
Sleep regularity beats sleep duration. “Sleep regularity was a stronger predictor of all-cause mortality than sleep duration.” They computed a Sleep Regularity Index from more than 10 million hours of wrist accelerometer data in 60,977 UK Biobank participants, and the most regular sleepers had meaningfully lower all-cause, cancer, and cardiometabolic mortality risk. ~ learn more
130% solar cells, kind of. “The result is a measurable quantum yield of around 130%.” Not exactly 130% energy efficiency as the article title implies, it is 1.3 charge carriers harvested per photon, which is still pretty cool.. ~ learn more
The first BCI company with a CE marked device for the restoration of detailed form vision. “For decades, losing central vision to this disease meant losing the ability to read, recognize faces, and ultimately losing independence. There was no viable treatment. Now there is.” Science Corp. says PRIMA just launched commercially in Europe after receiving a CE mark, and NEJM-published trial results suggest it can restore functional central vision for some patients with geographic atrophy from age-related macular degeneration. ~ learn more
teaching the kids 👩🏫
Sit with not-knowing. “The faster [the students] go, the fewer the opportunities for hesitation, judgment, or uncertainty.” Gert Biesta argues schools should protect that slow, resistant space, especially now that AI can rush students to a polished answer before they have even decided what is worth asking. ~ learn more
profiles of people 🚶
The man behind Grand Theft Auto 6: Strauss Zelnick. This guy’s story is absolutely incredible. Could not recommend it more. “Zelnick had written memos for Carl Icahn twice saying stay away. Then Icahn told him to read the bylaws.” ~ learn more