my story 🚀
🇲🇽 I spent a few days in Mexico City last week and enjoyed amazing food and good company amidst some rainy weather. It is a great pleasure to navigate the city by bike at twice the speed of traffic!
⚠️ I find myself leaning into AI capabilities more and more, and encouraging my coworkers to do the same. I must admit, though, that my apprehension is growing! At some point I am certain that it’s going to take a regrettable irreversible action, and I can only hope that the fallout is limited. This week I had it file a $0 tax return for an entity of mine (via an online service), and I held my breath the whole time. It worked, though! If you have any suggestions for flying close to the AI sun without taking on the fate of Icarus, I would love to hear.
fun facts 🙌
I learned that in 2025 the US paused enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. The order argues that “overexpansive and unpredictable FCPA enforcement” harms “American economic competitiveness and, therefore, national security.” Of course, this is true. It’s been true since the act was passed, as well. But our global competitive position seems to have changed… so, good people of America, bribe on! ~ learn more
Climbed El Capitan with his son. “A Colorado father who climbed Yosemite’s El Capitan with his 7-year-old son says someone reported him to child protective services, questioning his parenting.” Don’t worry, CPS backed right off. ~ learn more
Notes from the underground of film preservation. The piece traces how bootlegs, remuxes, and fan restorations sometimes become the only way to see films as they originally existed. “Fans, in contrast, answer to no one but themselves, which has let them accomplish what studios with exponentially more resources and infrastructure haven’t: banding together to preserve and disseminate historically accurate versions of some of the most beloved films in history.” ~ learn more
tech, startups, internet ⚡
Reality is bending. A manifesto on brain-computer interfaces. Carve out some time to read this 3-part article. “The future, which used to arrive in decades, now arrives by the month.” A crisp manifesto on the “bandwidth problem” between humans and AI, and why brain computer interfaces might be the only interface that scales with what is coming. ~ learn more
AI beats junior accountants. “We find that on medium-length, well-defined accounting tasks, frontier AI models are now faster and more accurate than junior accountants, even the best one in our study.” This came from hiring 12 CPAs to do simplified APEX-Accounting tasks, and the models ended up scoring perfectly, so there was no room to measure “AI augmentation.” ~ learn more
Leading the agentic AI transformation. This is a keynote by Amandeep Khurana (AWS at the time, now at Anthropic) on how AI is moving toward more autonomous models and what that means for organizations. Most valuable is that he talks about the building blocks within an organization that positions them to really take advantage of the new technology. Because, “bolting AI onto old systems is like hitching a jet engine to a horse cart.” ~ learn more
to your health ⚕
Skip the scam cold products. “There are a lot of scam products out there.” A licensed pharmacist walks through what actually helps with common cold symptoms, and what to ignore. ~ learn more
under the microscope 🔬
Reconstructing the mind’s eye. “MindEye can retrieve the exact original image even among highly similar candidates indicating that its brain embeddings retain fine-grained image-specific information.” The model maps fMRI activity into CLIP image space, then uses a diffusion prior to reconstruct what someone saw. They even scale retrieval to huge databases like LAION-5B. ~ learn more
A clinical trial of BPC-157. “This study is a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled pilot trial investigating the effects of BPC-157 on tendon healing and functional recovery following arthroscopic rotator cuff repair…” ~ learn more
profiles of people 🚶
Jason Flom: the relentless A&R rebel. “what we think is good is nothing compared to what the public thinks”. That line became Flom’s north star, from betting on Twisted Sister’s 3,000-kids-on-a-Wednesday momentum to picking the right Matchbox Twenty single. ~ learn more