P.S. You Should Know... | Issue #😅
Barton Springs is Cool
my story 🚀
😅 For this and then next 2 weeks I’m going to skip issue numbers because sometime in February I managed to get out of order (again). “Will the real Issue 471 please stand up.”
fun facts 🙌
Payphone tag. “Payphone calls in Australia are now free. No coins, no credit, just pick up and dial.” Someone turned the collection 14,000 free payphones across the country into a real world game of territory control. ~ learn more
How to talk to anyone - and why you should. “You don’t always know if it’s OK. Sometimes you have to take the risk and find out.” The Guardian argues we’ve lost the everyday habit of talking to strangers, and that the stakes are usually lower than our brains predict. I am a big fan of talking to strangers! ~ learn more
Happy map. 100,000 moments of human happiness, mapped. ~ learn more
oh, austin 🤠
Trials by PEAK6. During a chat with Matt Hulsizer I learned of their initiative to seed entrepreneurs with capital and distribution to build new fintech businesses. They’re calling it Trials. “Trials isn’t an accelerator or incubator. There are no cohorts or demo days. It’s a 12-month commitment to building real businesses with real revenue and real customers. It will look different for every founder.” Applications are open. ~ learn more
tech, startups, internet ⚡
Fungible factories. “Because the entire process is encoded in software and the hardware is identical, activating new cells is like installing a new program on a computer.” Ben Reinhardt sketches “fungible factories”: shipping-crate-sized manufacturing cells you can copy-paste to scale production, switch outputs, and even “push” product updates unit by unit. ~ learn more
Claude Code unpacked. Thanks to a leak of the Claude Code source code, we now have things like this. “What actually happens when you type a message into Claude Code?” A neat interactive explainer of the agent loop, the tool system, slash commands, and even “Hidden Features” that are sitting in the code but not shipped yet. ~ learn more
better doing 🎯
Letting an LLM write for you. “Letting an LLM write for you is like paying somebody to work out for you.” The argument is simple: writing is where you do the thinking, and outsourcing it costs you both understanding and credibility. ~ learn more
Seeing like a spreadsheet. “This is a story about how a piece of software transformed the way that American businesses understood themselves, and how they were understood by others.” David Oks argues the spreadsheet quietly rewired corporate life, from what managers can measure to what companies choose to optimize. ~ learn more
Be wary of workers who buy into the corporate BS. “Corporate bullshit confuses rather than clarifies. It may sound impressive, but it is semantically empty.” Cornell researchers built a Corporate Bullshit Receptivity Scale and found that people most impressed by “visionary” jargon also tended to score lower on analytic thinking and workplace decision-making. ~ learn more
retail therapy 💸
The worst of what gambling and prediction markets will do. “We’ll bet that certain pitches will be balls; you throw those pitches into the dirt; we’ll win the bets and give you some money.” Thompson’s point is that modern gambling finds the lowest-effort way to corrupt everything, from a single forgettable pitch to wartime information. I’m not as absolutist on the morality here, but I do worry about the implications of our rapid societal embrace of gambling in all forms. ~ learn more
under the microscope 🔬
Why I may ‘hire’ AI instead of a graduate student. “AI requires no ramp-ups, no meetings, and absolutely no emotional support.” A professor writes about the quiet temptation to hand the messy early parts of research to a machine, and what that does to the old apprenticeship model. ~ learn more
profiles of people 🚶
The online poker boom up close. Taylor Caby describes watching the online poker boom up close, then realizing the whole thing was shakier than it looked. Also lots of other great story and nuggets here. "There was no like smartphones, which was great. You go into your room and do my work, play poker, and then when I left it was just over. There was nothing to think about... which is a super underrated problem with business today that you just are—I mean everybody knows this—you're always connected. If you can find something that allows you to disconnect, I think it's just like incredibly valuable." ~ learn more