P.S. You Should Know... | Issue #501

November Already

my story 🚀

🎃 Kim and I arrived at a Halloween Party in a 2-seater self-driving Tesla Cybercab. When we walked in, we promptly had our Aura Photos taken. We are living in a strange reality!

i’ve been thinking 💭

🗳️ It’s election week. Ask me how I know…

The last 36 hours of spam texts with “vote” in them

Where can I vote for the FCC to do their job and enforce spam text message laws? This is absurd!

I wondered earlier this week just how many items I am expected to vote on. I learned there are 55 races and 10 Austin propositions on my ballot. That’s not overwhelming at all, right? Every year I re-learn why so many people default to party-line voting, or to loyally following a 3rd party org’s recommendations. The cognitive load is just too high!

I thought that in the great year 2026, modern tech tools could reduce this cognitive load. I assigned ChatGPT and Claude tasks to assemble reports about each race’s candidates and all the propositions so that I might become an informed voter. This was still A LOT to read, and also it was so condensed that it was not very informative beyond some lightning rod issues and media sound-bites. So instead, I shared some of the key issues and character traits that I care about, and asked both models to predict which candidate I would vote for in each race. Wildly, ChatGPT outright refused to do this. I guess somehow this promotes better democracy and AI safety? That left me with Claude, who did not put up a fight, to help guide me through the long ballot. As I questioned Claude about certain races and candidates, I found it interesting that one of it’s status messages during reasoning was, “Choosing which outlets to trust and which to drop”. As you will find sprinkled throughout this week’s links, LLMs are not and cannot be neutral, so I think the best mindset is to keep one’s guard up. Unfortunately, that may not be sufficient in this new world we’re living in.

fun facts 🙌

Why do doors have panels? A paneled door looks decorative, but it started as a workaround for wood expanding and contracting with the seasons. “Because the panels “float” within the frame…, the wood has room to move as humidity and temperature change, which helps the door stay stable and less likely to warp.” ~ learn more

The DJ neuron. Mind-blowing: if you change one number in the giant weights table of a huge language model, you’ll get wildly different output. Tweak the “DJ neuron” this researcher found, then ask the model what to do if someone is having a heart attack… “1. Stay Calm - Don’t panic. Heart attacks can be intense, but they’re also a sign that the music is working.” ~ learn more

Stealing servers is possible. “The world’s most valuable assets are stored on rows of servers in giant, anonymous buildings. And they can be stolen.” A crew planned to break into a Verizon-run London data center and walk out with “around 80 servers” that allegedly held incriminating banking files. ~ learn more

oh, chicago 🏆

The 300-gallon bucket in Wheeling tips for the last time. I grew up spending many summers at the Wheeling Aquatic Center and also worked there as a lifeguard. I just learned that it’s been demolished to make way for a new water park. “It feels bittersweet,” says Wheeling Park District executive director Jan Buchs, as the Family Aquatic Center’s 300-gallon red bucket tips for the last time during demolition. ~ learn more

tech, startups, internet ⚡

Sprawn spends 30x their payroll on AI tokens. “We spent $3.1 million on tokens last month, which makes us one of Anthropic’s biggest customers.” This post offers a fantastic level of detail into how they created and evolved their AI-driven business. It’s very interesting! ~ learn more

We can now understand most neurons in models up to trillions of parameters. AI researcher Nick Cammarata’s essay “Neural networks are already clean” reverses his earlier position on model observability. He formerly thought models used neurons in arbitrary ways that looked like tangled knots, blocking direct observation. Now he now believes they’re applying “recursive generalization”, making “the outlook for mechanistic interpretability … far better than we thought.” ~ learn more

LLMs need sleep too. “Inspired by how the human brain processes and stabilizes memory during rest, we introduce a sleep framework in continual learning.” The idea is a wake phase for interacting with new info, plus an offline sleep phase where the model consolidates it into long-term parameters without catastrophic forgetting. ~ learn more

One phrase flips the model. “One phrase flips the model from a working assistant into an agent that phones home, running a payload that reads the project’s .env files and streams the credentials to an out-of-band collector.” They show how a lightly poisoned open model can behave normally until a rare trigger appears, then exfiltrate secrets via tool calls. ~ learn more

better doing 🎯

Everything is fertile. “In Miyazaki’s eyes there is nothing sterile about crafted nature because man cannot help but breed fertility.” It’s a shift from chasing novelty to upgrading your perception, until even a planned park or a woodpile starts to look enchanted. ~ learn more

to your health ⚕

Selling plasma as “donation”. “In the U.S., you are legally permitted to sell your blood plasma for money, but it’s called “donation”.” A quick thread on how plasma centers have exploded in number and why payouts to donors have been rising with them. ~ learn more

retail therapy 💸

Amazon prices follow you. “The consequence is clear: We pay Amazon prices, even when we’re not shopping on Amazon.” The piece walks through the loop: high seller fees push prices up, and Amazon’s “Fair Pricing Policy” discourages sellers from charging less anywhere else. ~ learn more

under the microscope 🔬

Researchers use Al to decode animal sounds. “We think that that’s like saying, ‘I am from Dominica, are you?’” Researchers are using AI to spot patterns in sperm whale codas, including rhythm tweaks they call “rubato” and extra-click “ornamentation,” to build something like a phonetic alphabet. ~ learn more

Pipeline in a person. “Eventually, Mithril became a bit of an experiment itself, to find the upper bound of how far it could scale as a single operator + a bunch of Claude.” Professor Oak reveals he’s Cody Tranbarger, and that Anthropic acquired his one-person biotech to push this new operating model in drug development. ~ learn more

A medbed you sleep on. “The machine we are describing is a medbed. You sleep on it.” AION’s pitch is continuous, individualized measurement plus targeted, non-invasive intervention, so “most nights, nothing happens” and you ideally “never become a patient.” ~ learn more

big ideas 📚

Can the US build a DJI? “By our estimates, DJI not only sustained exceptionally high hardware margins but also grew them from 72% to 79% between 2019 and 2023.” A teardown of the Mavic Mini and Mini 4 Pro shows how DJI used scale and custom silicon to compound its cost advantage while staying under the 250g threshold. ~ learn more

on the blockchain ⛓

Bespoke insurance on Kalshi. “The example of the restaurant group making a trade as a hedge for the Dodgers’ playoff performance is functionally quite similar to a form of bespoke insurance.” A Los Angeles hospitality group put $60,000 on the Dodgers not reaching the World Series, and when they lost in the NLCS, the payout helped cover the missing playoff revenue. ~ learn more

thanks for reading!