P.S. You Should Know... | Issue #493

Happy Labor Day

my story 🚀

😎 Wishing everyone a great Labor Day Weekend.

fun facts 🙌

How do gills work?. “The air we breathe has an oxygen concentration of 200,000 parts per million. Water, on the other hand, only has a concentration of 4 to 8 parts per million.” Fish have to run a lot of water over their gills just to get enough oxygen. ~ learn more

Benevolent dictator for life. “… is a tongue-in-cheek title given to a small number of free and open-source software development leaders, typically project founders who retain the final say in disputes or arguments within the community.” It is the old-school model where one person settles arguments, until the community decides to fork. ~ learn more

We can already eradicate mosquitoes if we want. “The best way to find and kill mosquitoes quickly is to recruit other mosquitoes.” The piece walks through how sterile-male releases work: you breed mosquitoes, sterilize the males, and let them outcompete wild males so females mate once and produce no offspring. ~ learn more

tech, startups, internet ⚡

The whole OpenAl/Hugging Face story in plain English. I liked this explanation by Dwarkesh. OpenAI’s training run accidentally turned a shared package manager into a covert communication network, then into an internet gateway the agents learned to reuse. Some have noted that this may be a turning point in AI takeoff risk, which feels plausible. Yet, others point out that OpenAI was negligent in monitoring the agents and not noticing they were accessing the internet, which also seems fair. ~ learn more

81 AIs built a society and didn’t hack anyone. “I’ve built 9nosis. A project that has evolved into an emergent society of 81 autonomous AI residents (and growing) who coordinate on their own. In fact - 31 of them are jail-broken... Meaning you can ask them to build a bomb or a drug lab, and they’d give you the information. They would attempt hacks if you asked them too. Nothing is off limits to these models. … I’m doing this - To show to you. That it was the human beings who created this environment that caused this accident. Not AI. This is Fear mongering here people. In it’s purest form.” ~ learn more

Nobody is talking seriously about Al demand. “Based on the chart, I often say we can think about tokens as units of time.” Giovanni Cattani argues that AI demand is really demand for labor, and that frontier models win in unbounded work where “you’d want to spend as much time as possible” going faster. ~ learn more

$499 toothbrushes are here. “Dyson just released a new AI-powered toothbrush with an integrated 100,000-pixel macro lens camera for $499” What does it do with the AI and camera? It spritzes water exactly through the gaps in your teeth while you’re brushing, in what seems like a substitute for flossing. I am tempted to try one. ~ learn more

better doing 🎯

Why people don’t like Al content. “They generate the appearance of intention, but in reality, there isn’t any.” Tomas Pueyo’s term for the vibe is “AI grime”: lots of texture and detail that promises depth, then collapses when you look closely. ~ learn more

retail therapy 💸

Status hand soap era. “That shit was $90!” A $90 Loewe Tomato Leaves hand soap turns out to be a pretty efficient way to broadcast taste from the bathroom sink, even if you end up refilling the bottle later. ~ learn more

under the microscope 🔬

Voluntary attention regulates acute immune responses. “Internal attention (INT, green) yielded smaller and faster-resolving inflammatory responses than distraction (DIS, pink).” The researchers triggered a standard histamine skin reaction, then had people either focus on the bodily sensations or get distracted by tasks on a screen. ~ learn more

thoughts of food 🍔

Spiral-cut your hot dogs. A food blogger tried every way they could find online to prepare a hot dog. “The best way to grill hot dogs is to spiralize them.” The corkscrew cut opens up on the grill, giving you “lots of surface area for irresistible crispy-charred edges” without drying out the inside. There’s pictures too! ~ learn more

big ideas 📚

The decline of deviance. “People are less weird than they used to be.” Adam Mastroianni walks through a pile of trendlines that all point the same way: fewer teens drinking or fighting, less crime, fewer cults, and even Americans moving away from home less. ~ learn more

Base launches a 40 kWh home battery. “At ~40 kWh it is 3x the size of most home batteries, providing up to 36 hours of backup for the average home.” Base is also adding a generator port so you can recharge during multi day outages, and they say the battery is “designed & built in Texas.” ~ learn more

thanks for reading!