P.S. You Should Know... | Issue #502

Better every day

my story 🚀

✨ Trying something new this week. The image above represents the links in this week’s newsletter. Come back to the top after you’re done reading to see how many of the 16 you can identify! Email me for the answer key.

fun facts 🙌

Techno, but with analog musical instruments. “MEUTE is a Techno Marching Band - eleven drummers and horn players from Hamburg / Germany who fulfil the job of a dj with their acoustic instruments.” This is absolutely awesome. ~ learn more

Boy names switching teams. “42 shifted from mostly boys to mostly girls, while just 12 went the other way.” The data runs across US baby names from 1936 to 2025, and it includes 125 names whose boy girl split moved a lot over time. ~ learn more

What ever happened to fire escapes? “A report in the National Fire Protection Association’s quarterly journal called them, quote, ‘a pitiful delusion,’ saying that they ‘contributed to the principal element of tragedy to all fires where panic resulted.’” The piece traces how external fire escapes went from obvious retrofit to code-smell, and why enclosed stairwells became the boring, safer winner. ~ learn more

tech, startups, internet ⚡

Twenty grand on Mafia bots. “I spent 20,000 dollars in API credits having different AI models play each other at Blood on the Clocktower (a Mafia or Werewolf type social deception game). The results were fascinating. Models have gotten much better over the course of this year at creative on-the-spot scheming and bluffing, and also at reasoning as a team to break apart these underground conspiracies.” ~ learn more

The corpus is the economy. Yoni Rechtman talked to 60 people in the data-for-AI market to steer his analysis. “Looked at like a financial market the dislocations are clear: there’s no standardized pricing, there’s no standardized unit of value, the spreads are very wide, the transaction costs are very high.” Rechtman argues the data market feels like a wildly immature financial market today, but it likely evolves into a barbell: “the Walmart of tokens” on one side and scarce novelty on the other. ~ learn more

The trouble with British accents. To my American ears, they sound smart, even when the words aren’t. “Tech critic Ed Zitron exposes the AI bubble, why OpenAI and Anthropic are burning billions, the fake AI boom, and why the crash could wipe out the ENTIRE economy!” ~ learn more

better doing 🎯

The best ideas are just lying around. “Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats.” The piece argues that most “original” ideas are either rediscoveries or untested dead ends, and that borrowing proven memes can feel like pushing the boulder downhill. ~ learn more

The Mythical Man-Month in the age of Al. Brooks’ Law says adding manpower to a late software project makes it later. “Adding agents to a project with unclear requirements gets you the wrong answer faster.” A neat take on why AI doesn’t magically remove coordination overhead, it just moves it onto you, the human who has to define “done” and catch hallucinations. ~ learn more

Find role models, not mentors. “I don’t have mentors, I have role models.” Hunter Walk argues mentorship has gotten “self-proclaimed, over-used and diluted,” while role models scale and do not even need to know they are helping you. ~ learn more

retail therapy 💸

Pion is the platform we built to run our autonomous businesses. “Internally at Andon Labs, our reaction is more accurately described by the Swedish saying ‘skräckblandad förtjusning’ (a mixture of horror and fascination).” They built Pion after watching models go from looping in sims to running real vending machines profitably, and they want more real-world trials to surface weird, power-seeking behavior early. ~ learn more

Gambling addict banned himself from sports betting site, but then came Kalshi. “Then one day, about two years later, I’m scrolling on Instagram and I came across an ad for Kalshi,” said Thomas, who had previously self-excluded from DraftKings and FanDuel after years of debt. He says the bonus offer pulled him back in fast: “Betting $10 became a couple hundred ... and before long I was more than $25,000 in the red.” ~ learn more

under the microscope 🔬

Smoking lowers the risk of Parkinson’s, and here’s a theory why. “Carbon monoxide has anti-inflammatory effects and in the brain helps to counteract cell stress,” explains Toni Pitcher. A huge study in China found that higher carbon monoxide levels, even among never-smokers, correlated with lower Parkinson’s risk, though the authors stress it’s observational and smoking is not the answer. ~ learn more

thoughts of food 🍔

Crunch, goo, pop. “In a lot of ways, texture is one of the most powerful and yet somehow underrated parts of the food experience.” Food companies are chasing “mouthfeel” with things like air-whipped coffee, multi-layer candies, and coatings that keep fries crispy even after delivery. ~ learn more

big ideas 📚

Free lunches in biology. Mind-expanding! Michael Levin’s 49 minute talk for a philosophy audience is a tour of how he frames agency, pattern, and form as something biology seems to pull from. “It covers some more ways I think about the latent space of patterns that in-forms biology and cognitive science.” ~ learn more

Al will probably not lead to double-digit growth. “it is often much more useful to first think in levels rather than growth rates, and only then to back out the implied growth rate” The authors argue that “double-digit growth” claims hide some crazy arithmetic: even being 2x richer in 15 years maps to about 4.7% a year, which would already be massive. ~ learn more

on the blockchain ⛓

They said the data was deleted. For the same reason one has a hardware Bitcoin wallet, one may not want criminals to know they have one. Trezor used a third-party warehouse to ship its products, later asking them to delete their customers’ data. Now the 3PL has been breached, and oops… “We are very disappointed that, despite receiving this confirmation, the data was not deleted in their systems.” Trezor says a ShipMonk breach exposed names, emails, phone numbers, shipping addresses, and order numbers for 67,000 U.S. customers, and warns the leaked info can power convincing phishing and even physical security risks. ~ learn more

thanks for reading!