P.S. You Should Know... | Issue #489

Gifts

my story 🚀

🎁 AI is making kindness easier for me. Ordinarily choosing gifts or shopping for others is stress-inducing to me, so I don’t do it as often as I’d like to. This year I’m making a concerted effort to be better at it, but with a little help.

1. So many birthdays every year. I’ve assigned an agent the job of remembering birthdates of all my nieces and nephews and prompting me with timely gift ideas a couple weeks prior. I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the suggestions it makes, and it’s been responsible for about half of the winning ideas.

2. The Doordash app has a built-in AI assistant. It helped me build a full cart of snacks from the grocery store to send to the nursing staff who are caring for my loved one.

Maybe making gifting easier is one of the ways that AI is going to boost global GDP?

fun facts 🙌

NearbyWiki. “Wikipedia places nearby” is a map that shows you interesting places nearby listed on Wikipedia. ~ learn more

RecipeTables. “A prep-table notation invented by Michael Chu at Cooking for Engineers: ingredients down the left, each step a merged cell spanning exactly what it combines. The whole recipe reads in one look — no scrolling back and forth between the ingredient list and the instructions.” ~ learn more

Beard transplant review. “The procedure cost around $10,000, which is obviously a lot of money. But for me, it was worth every cent.” One guy explains how a beard transplant changed the way he’s viewed (or at least the way he thinks he’s viewed) at work, and how much mental bandwidth that freed up. ~ learn more

Mario meets Pareto. “Between you and me, if you want to win, never allow Koopa to sit in your kart!” The article uses Mario Kart 8 to explain the Pareto frontier: filter out builds that are strictly worse on every stat, then choose based on your own trade-offs. ~ learn more

oh, chicago 🏆

Why Brandon Johnson’s school board is going broke on purpose. “You have to create the crisis by which the boss…the government can no longer ignore you,” CTU President Stacy Davis Gates said, and the piece argues that logic is now showing up in CPS budgeting. The board passed a budget its own leadership called unbalanced, including “$150 million in state money out of thin air.” ~ learn more

tech, startups, internet ⚡

Gwern goes public. “I am retiring from fulltime writing (& pseudonymity) to launch Guardian Angel Inc and bring GAs to life.” The pitch is that big labs “structurally cannot build agents loyal to an individual user” because incentives will eventually clash. ~ learn more

It feels like magic. Naomi Bashkansky left OpenAI to join Conduit, which is building non-invasive thought-to-text models and imagining what day-to-day work might look like once your brain can talk to your tools. ~ learn more

How we collected 10,000 hours of neuro-language data in our basement. Conduit, mentioned above, has this fun post. “Over the last 6 months, we collected ~10k hours of data across thousands of unique individuals.” Their setup runs 20 hours a day and the key constraint is boring ops stuff like session throughput, comfort, and keeping participants engaged. ~ learn more

The quote that wrecks the PR. “Fuck them. The Journal is next on the list after [Ina Steiner].” Court records say this was former eBay CEO Devin Wenig reacting to unfavorable coverage, before eBay and former execs finalized a $55.7M settlement with the EcommerceBytes publishers targeted in the 2019 cyberstalking campaign. ~ learn more

better doing 🎯

Don’t be a meat proxy. “Please don’t do this. I mean, I’ve done this. But I’ve been on the receiving end too many times now.” A good reminder that pasting raw LLM output into Slack or code review isn’t helpful. Read it, check it, then answer in your own words. ~ learn more

High agency beats smart. “Being smart and making good business decisions will increasingly become a commodity.” David Cummings argues that as AI makes intelligence cheap and everywhere, the real edge shifts to people who initiate action and can build trust with other humans. ~ learn more

to your health ⚕

Jumping jacks for your eyes. “It’s like jumping jacks for your eyes and your brain,” says Dr. Joe LaPlaca, whose VR drills are now part of some NBA referees’ pregame routines. The same eye-tracking and cognition work is spreading to athletes and even brain health, where companies want an objective “vital sign for the brain.” ~ learn more

Checkups are becoming luxury goods. “From 2018 to 2023, the number of fee-based practices grew by 83.1 percent” as more primary-care doctors leave insurance-based clinics for concierge and direct primary care. The draw is simple: patients pay a fee “for an easier time getting an appointment or a call back.” The article gives voice to the point that the market dynamics reduce doctors for everyone else. Maybe we could… train more doctors? ~ learn more

Intelligence is not the bottleneck. “no matter how “intelligent” AI becomes, intelligence is often not the main bottleneck to things changing in the real world.” Ruxandra Bio argues that in medicine the grind of clinical trials, data access, and governance shape what actually gets built and approved, even if models keep improving. ~ learn more

retail therapy 💸

GLP-1s might move GDP. “Citi estimates that GLP-1 drugs could boost GDP by 0.5 percent to one percent in rich countries.” The piece argues these drugs look like a general-purpose health innovation, with effects that could show up as higher labor force participation and productivity. ~ learn more

under the microscope 🔬

Sugar substitutes and brain aging. “People who consumed the greatest amounts of sweeteners experienced a 62% faster decline in overall thinking and memory abilities than those who consumed the least.” The study tracked self-reported diet questionnaires from 12,772 adults for about eight years and found the link was strongest in people with diabetes and adults under 60. ~ learn more

Program ions like software. “Our method replaces that physical solution switching with rapid changes in the electrical circuit, allowing ions to move continuously in one direction through the system.” The researchers say electrochemical ion pumping can desalinate salty industrial wastewater and also keep valuable metals like copper out of the brine stream for easier recovery. ~ learn more

A selective PFAS binder from oats. “NeutraOat is a modified form of oat fiber (β-glucan) that binds PFAS in your gut before they get reabsorbed.” Grain Labs is recruiting 15 adults with elevated PFOS for a 12-week at-home pilot with before-and-after PFAS and wellness panels. ~ learn more

thoughts of food 🍔

DoorDash gets permission to run an airline. “For us it’s not just about building the drone, it’s just as much about running the airline: the routing, the safety systems, the operational layer that makes everything fly smoothly.” DoorDash says it got FAA Part 135 certification and is launching DoorDash Air, an in-house drone delivery program built inside DoorDash Labs. ~ learn more

thanks for reading!