P.S. You Should Know... | Issue #👩🚒
Climb up, slide down
my story 🚀
🏐 At some point the tetherballs were removed from these poles at the school playground. Of course that doesn’t stop them from being fun!
fun facts 🙌
How funerals keep Africa poor. “So common is this sentiment that the Akan have a saying: abusua do funu, ‘the family loves the corpse.’” The essay argues that lavish funerals work as a costly signal of loyalty inside intense kinship networks, making it harder for individuals to save and invest. ~ learn more
Penguin relationship flowchart. “The Kyoto Aquarium in Japan keeps a wall-sized flowchart tracking the romantic relationships, breakups, and drama between their penguins.” It has color codes for couples, breakups, and “it’s complicated,” plus notes like one penguin being “basically demonic.” ~ learn more
Designed for a bad experience. “Then I thought, what if objects were actually designed for a bad user experience, instead of a good one?” Greek architect Katerina Kamprani makes deliberately inconvenient everyday objects, and the interview gets at why useless prototypes can still be beautiful and clarifying. ~ learn more
oh, austin 🤠
High risk, low reward municipal spending cuts. “Eliminating IT positions at Austin Energy or the airport does not save you a dime in the general fund and therefore does not free up any money to prevent cuts to parks, social services, public safety etc.” The piece argues the city’s IT consolidation pitch leans on shaky peer comparisons and could create real operational risk for utilities without fixing the budget problem it claims to address. ~ learn more
tech, startups, internet ⚡
New tools create new biology. “Similarly it is by means of the new tools and techniques developed in many instances by the physical sciences that the door to a biology of molecules has only recently been opened.” Weaver’s bet at Rockefeller was basically instrumentation as a strategy: fund the ultracentrifuge, electron microscope, X-ray diffraction, then watch whole new kinds of evidence become possible. ~ learn more
Caveman work good. “Same fix. 75% less word. Brain still big.” A tiny Claude Code skill that forces terse, caveman-style answers so you burn fewer tokens without losing the technical meat. ~ learn more
better doing 🎯
All writers will end up AI-maxxing. “AI is so beneficial to writers and content creators that people will have no choice but to use it.” Hanania argues the real line is not human vs AI, it’s whether you verify claims and sources before you publish. ~ learn more
Six years of Al and the world got stupider. “The entire life of the artist, indeed, the life of the mind in general, is defined by resistance to slop.” Erik Hoel’s argument from experience: LLMs mostly scale output and efficiency, but don’t seem to raise the ceiling on good writing. ~ learn more
I’m Oughties-Amish and it feels great. “An underappreciated fact about the Amish is that they’re not simply Luddites. They don’t oppose technology qua technology; rather, they oppose its deleterious effects. This is why nearly all of them accept washing machines because they just make your life better, and hand-washing really sucks.” The core of Jehan Azad’s approach: keep the useful stuff, delete the feed-shaped stuff, and make your phone more BlackBerry than slot machine. ~ learn more
to your health ⚕
American Heart Association’s risk calculator. After I gave it a folder containing my labs, Claude did all the work to fill in this online calculator for me. “It is the first risk tool to combine cardiovascular, kidney, and metabolic health measures to guide primary prevention-focused treatment decisions.” Built on data from “over 6.5 million U.S. adults,” it gives separate 10-year and 30-year risk estimates for total CVD, ASCVD, and heart failure. ~ learn more
under the microscope 🔬
Al suit teaches you new skills by taking control of your muscles. “A user approaches an unfamiliar window, says ‘EMS, help me open this,’ and the system identifies the handle type and electrically guides their fingers, wrist, and elbow through the correct sequence.” It’s electrical muscle stimulation plus smart glasses and a multimodal model, with a safety layer to stop the AI from instructing movements that would hurt you (but you’ll probably need to sign a waiver). ~ learn more
teaching the kids 👩🏫
The Promised Land for education has been 1:1 tutoring since Aristotle tutored the young prince Alexander the Great. “Exponentials are hard for even math teachers to internalize.” The piece argues that most edtech is still procedural, while LLMs are the first tech that could make 1:1 tutoring actually rich, interactive, and cheap. ~ learn more
big ideas 📚
The future of fertility. “Sheila grabs her gym bag from the floor, leaves the house and closes the door with peace of mind, knowing that AR1, AR2, and AR3 will take good care of her 17 children.” Tomas Pueyo opens with sci-fi domesticity, then argues fertility could rebound once the costs of conceiving and childrearing collapse. ~ learn more
on the blockchain ⛓
NYT writer thinks he’s found Satoshi. “Having encountered my share of liars and developed something of an expertise in their tells, Mr. Back’s demeanor, his shifty eyes, his awkward chuckle, the jerky movement of his left hand, struck me as fishy.” Carreyrou replays an HBO clip and then spends a year chasing linguistic tells and old forum posts that point to Adam Back. ~ learn more
profiles of people 🚶
Ryan Petersen (@typesfast) can also talk fast. He’s a fountain of interesting comments. “The idea of a one-person company is stupid.” Ryan Petersen (Flexport) talks through why real leverage comes from coordination, not solo grind, then veers into tariffs, fraud, and AI alignment via René Girard. ~ learn more