P.S. You Should Know... | Issue #497

Always a good time to be outside

my story 🚀

🏌️‍♂️ Approximately once a year I get invited to golf, and it’s great!

🎥 In a group chat of college friends, someone asked for recommendations on non-animated family movies and the group delivered. The list ended up being 35 movies long! I turned it into a website. My kids have seen 9 so far, so I think we’re doing alright as parents (all glory to Kim). Next up, Ladybugs!

fun facts 🙌

Throwing people out windows. “In the Middle Ages and early modern times, defenestration was not uncommon, the act carried elements of lynching and mob violence in the form of murder committed together.” Prague has three famous episodes (1419, 1483, 1618), and the 1618 one helped spark the Thirty Years’ War. ~ learn more

Multiple values in a single Excel cell. My brain exploded. “We’re introducing lists and arrays in Excel, a new feature that allows you to store multiple values in one cell.” ~ learn more

Slop Cannons LOVE purple for some reason. “Slop UI is the UI that AI cooks up that looks off, where it’s not supposed to be, doesn’t serve a purpose or when a UI is too generic.” The article identifies 10 tells of a slop ui. ~ learn more

tech, startups, internet ⚡

A video Turing test winner? “48% of people who talked to it live thought it was a real human. Previous systems have had a pass rate <3%.” Tavus says their new model Griffin does full-duplex video, meaning it can “listen, watching and talking at the same time, the way people actually talk.” ~ learn more

Tech groupthink. “The particularly interesting thing about the Instinct conversation is just how emblematic it is of the groupthink endemic in tech and venture.” Hadick argues the product is fine, but the fawning says more about incentives and status games than technical moats. ~ learn more

Voice carries more than words. A startup claims heir model can do a lot more with recorded audio than just transcribe it. Including: “Disease-state presence and severity across neurological, cardiometabolic, respiratory, behavioral and cognitive conditions.” They sell it as a layer for voice AI that turns short snippets of audio into “typed signal” health and wellness indicators your product can use. ~ learn more

better doing 🎯

Andrej Karpathy’s latest LLM tip. Karpathy suggests forcing clearer formats like ASD-STE100 controlled language, diagrams, HTML pages, and even custom explainer videos to make model thinking easier to parse. I told my Claude to try these on stuff we’ve covered together to see for myself, and it’s quite good. ~ learn more

I love being wrong. “All this to say, I love being wrong. It is my favorite, because it helps me more clearly define the problem, find the right solution, learn more quickly, and solve the problem.” A simple six-step loop for product work: define, act, update your priors when new data shows up. ~ learn more

Better feedback with less threat. “The brain is a threat and reward machine.” If you want people to stay open and think clearly, the talk argues you should give feedback in ways that reduce social threat and increase a sense of reward. ~ learn more

retail therapy 💸

A billion-dollar drive-thru side hustle. “It’s an opportunity to generate revenue for the system with little in the way of additional cost, no operational complexity and no disruption to our customer experience,” McDonald’s CMO Morgan Flatley said, as the chain pilots ads on digital drive-thru boards. McDonald’s thinks the media network could eventually become “a $1 billion business.” ~ learn more

Burger King’s “Le Nugguette”. “Burger King has made a bag, and it is roughly the size of a chicken nugget.” It’s called Le Nugguette, and each one comes with a sauce charm plus a code for a four-piece nugget order. ~ learn more

under the microscope 🔬

CRISPR came from viruses. “Two new studies, published in Science, describe a similar RNA-guided system that originated in the viruses themselves and appears to be a precursor to CRISPR.” The system is called VIPR, and it uses a weird “skip-one” targeting code plus a protein-driven triplex to unwind DNA. ~ learn more

Sleep has an architecture. Researchers used a week of wrist accelerometer data from just under 100,000 UK Biobank participants and found sleep patterns tied to 156 conditions. “This suggests the nature, or ‘architecture’, of sleep you get is more important than simply an accumulation of naps throughout each day.” ~ learn more

Stanford researchers argue the forebrain and hindbrain come from separate origins. “We’ve shown for the first time that the front of the brain arises from a totally different progenitor cell than the back of the brain.” This explains why past efforts to coax stem cells into hindbrain cells have failed. ~ learn more

big ideas 📚

Landfill beats the recycling bin. “What if landfill, properly done, is actually one of the cleanest, cheapest, and most environmentally sensible things we can do with our waste?” The argument here is basically: recycle metals and scarce materials, but stop pretending every piece of plastic belongs in a blue bin. ~ learn more

Cold muonium atomic cannon. “So we’re using the chemical potential as an atomic cannon,” explains Jesse Zhang, describing how superfluid helium helps shoot muonium atoms out in a tight, cold beam. The goal is to measure whether “the equivalence between gravitational and inertial mass also applies to the second generation of particles.” ~ learn more

thanks for reading!