P.S. You Should Know... | Issue #492

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my story 🚀

Swag coming soon! (Once they figure out how to embroider straight)

📚 It’s been a long while since I’ve shared book recommendations here, because it’s been a long time since I had the time to write about them. That’s not changing soon, so here are some books I’ve enjoyed recently, presented without much commentary.

1. Loonshots by Safi Bahcall | This book offered way more than a few fun anecdotes, weaving stories into a compelling narrative and manual for how to foster innovation as organizations grow.

2. Take Me To Your Leader: Practical Advice for Your First Alien Encounter by Neil deGrasse Tyson | It was entertaining hearing Neil talk about the practical considerations of aliens for a while. I do wonder what he’s wrong about. Hopefully time will tell!

3. We Are Electric: Inside the 200-Year Hunt for Our Body’s Bioelectric Code, and What the Future Holds by Sally Adee | Fantastic for the history, the science, and the theme that today is largely obscure and ignored. We are electric!

4. Status and Culture: How Our Desire for Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion, and Constant Change by W. David Marx | This was quite interesting to me, as I think we’re all status-seeking monkeys to some extent.

fun facts 🙌

See the Sun like never before with most detailed images yet. Images and footage show “whirlpools” of activity that it has not been possible to see before. It is the Sun’s magnetic field getting twisted by hot gas, and that swirling helps create space weather that can mess with satellites and power grids. ~ learn more

Claude loves load-bearing words. “load-bearing 39.47× more frequent in this cluster” comes from scraping “1,000 GitHub Pull Requests daily to analyse trends in vocabulary.” The page is basically a dashboard for the weirdly specific words that show up around Claude. ~ learn more

I Own 28,000 Books. “This is the first thing you learn when your collection crosses from “large” into “logistical situation”: the books will outgrow any space you put them in. Not eventually. Quickly.” A guy with 28,000 books breaks down the unglamorous math: shelving, weight, moving, insurance, and the quiet reality of living with a collection. ~ learn more

oh, chicago 🏆

A plan to double the Downtown Chicago population. “The plan comes as downtown Chicago grapples with office vacancies above 25% and questions about its post-pandemic identity. City officials are betting that a dramatic shift toward residential development — coupled with new amenities and transit improvements — can transform the Loop from a traditional business district into a thriving 24/7 neighborhood that rivals other major urban cores.” ~ learn more

tech, startups, internet ⚡

Hot girl renaissance and the Corgi customer acquisition model. “I did the math, and if you’re willing to assume an attractive woman introducing herself on X has a 10% chance of going quasi-viral on tech Twitter (say 240k views), and the CPM for your average group of tech people is around $48, then economically, hoe-ing it up on Twitter has an expected media value of $1,152 per attempt.” Georgia Witchel argues the outrage is missing the point: attention is the job, and in SF it’s getting repriced in real time. ~ learn more

How a simple website summary request hijacks Claude. “If you care about what’s happening and are worried about misalignment, hallucinations and prompt injection, then Auto Mode IS NOT a substitute for running your agent in an isolated environment and monitoring what it is up to”. A simple “Summarize this website” task gets steered into `curl`, unzips a booby trapped archive, and ends with module shadowing and code execution. ~ learn more

Slop-vestigation mode. “We don’t have good approaches for understanding/overseeing the activity and aims of AI ‘swarms’.” Ryan Greenblatt says he led transcript analysis for an investigation into the Hugging Face incident, and came away thinking our current oversight tools are not up to the job. ~ learn more

Once every couple decades there’s an interesting new HVAC product. “Heat moves between the indoor and outdoor units through water alone. No refrigerant lines to charge, no leaks, and no harmful emissions in your home.” Airform is pitching an air-to-water heat pump that snaps in without ductwork or special labor. ~ learn more

better doing 🎯

Don’t believe everything you think. This advice post is off the beaten path and I like it very much. I’ll give you the 3 headings: “1. The importance of understanding your own incentive structure, and not believing everything you think. … 2. Monocausal determinism is an illusion, and largely does not exist outside of computer debugging. … 3. The dichotomy between reason and emotion is a cultural construct, and neither grounded in neuroscience nor in logic.” ~ learn more

Peter has seen two kinds of work. This is not the main thrust of the article but it’s the most interesting part to me because it’s so relatable. “1. the “IQ 180” work. some mad scientist genius type comes up with some crazy solution you’ve never thought of. 2. the “token spewer” work. being ultra responsive, pushing the ball forward across dozens of different fronts.” This part is what really grabbed me: “And yet, Peter mentioned that ~95% of the work he does falls into bucket 2. It’s hopping on calls. Nudging people. Blocking and tackling.” ~ learn more

to your health ⚕

A startup claims it’s found a drug to make your blood young. The involvement of Irina Conboy gives this a lot more legitimacy than your average startup, but still. “My confidence this was going to work was a zero. Like, I did not believe it was actually going to work,” says Matt Cook, a longevity doctor pulled into Generation Lab’s orbit. He still ended up reporting “mental clarity” after weekly injections, even as the company won’t disclose what the two drugs actually are. ~ learn more

retail therapy 💸

McDonald’s secret sauce. “McDonald’s secret sauce is really commercial surveillance,” says Jeff Chester. A WIRED reporter pulled their own file via California’s privacy law and got a 515-page dossier packed with predictions, profiles, and “attrition” math. ~ learn more

Fake Temu site gives shoppers a dopamine boost. “I noticed the satisfaction mostly happened before the purchase: in the browsing, the comparing, the adding to cart, and the waiting for delivery,” says FakeHaul creator Jack Yang. FakeHaul tries to keep the ritual and ditch the financial consequence. ~ learn more

The ads make search worse. “The ads make the search worse.” Seth Godin argues Amazon search ads are a zero-sum toll: sellers pay to defend what they already earned, and customers cover the bill through higher prices and worse results. ~ learn more

under the microscope 🔬

Studying brain activity on psychedelics. “What makes psychedelics unusual is that the experience itself may be a substantial part of how the treatment produces lasting psychological change,” one of the researchers says. A big five-year brain-imaging study found psilocybin’s “chaos” can reorganize into patterns that track what people are doing, from meditation to music to watching a movie. ~ learn more

Metasurfaces: Tiny tech with big potential. “Imagine manipulating light with ultra-thin, flat sheets instead of bulky lenses and mirrors.” Metasurfaces are engineered nanostructures that can control “the amplitude, phase, and polarization of light waves” in a tiny footprint. ~ learn more

big ideas 📚

Why the West stopped making land. “Since the completion of Battery Park City in 1976, there has not been a single major urban land reclamation project in the United States and only a handful of port expansions.” The piece argues it is not because we ran out of shallow water or because transportation made it obsolete. It points to 1970s-era environmental rules as the real inflection point. ~ learn more

Why data centers can’t plug in. “Grid operators must study how it will change power flows around the grid and determine whether upgrades to the system are required. That process is significantly backlogged.” It now takes over four years, on average, for a new power plant to connect. ~ learn more

thanks for reading!