P.S. You Should Know... | Issue #309

I need an AI that I can count on

my story 🚀

I am a dummy, at least occasionally. I missed my overseas trip because my passport is in expiration no-man’s-land. While it’s not expired, it’s also not “not expired” enough for most countries to let me in. I had known this rule in the past, but didn’t think of it in the present.

As a PSA/reminder for anyone who might benefit:

• Don’t let your passport get close to expiration. If it’s within 6 months, it’s too close.

• It used to be easy to get same-day passports. That’s no longer the case, so don’t count on it. The State department changed the rules during the Covid era.

• In Austin it’s not even possible anymore. In a handful of other cities it is, but appointments are limited. (My nearest option from Austin was in San Diego, followed by Honolulu).

i’ve been thinking 💭

Things I wish AI could do for me without my involvement:

• Know that my passport needs renewal and get it done

• Fill out cell phone protection claims paperwork for me

• Shop around for the best health care procedure prices

• Find the best deal on brake job for my vehicle

• Gather and submit all the documents my mortgage company requests

• Make a phone call to a non-digital vendor and pay a bill by credit card

We’re probably closer to some of these being commercial realities than other. What do you wish AI could do for you?

fun facts 🙌

I’ve never been to Japan, so I can only hope this isn’t representative…

Love will find a way. “Momo, a 12-year-old white-handed gibbon, shocked her keepers at the Kujukushima Zoo and Botanical Garden in Nagasaki in February 2021 when she gave birth despite having no known male companionship.” Now they know how it happened… “The zoo told CNN on Friday it believed that Momo and Itō had managed to mate through a small hole in a steel plate between their enclosures. The hole measured about 9 millimeters (0.3 inch) in diameter.” ~ learn more

tech, startups, internet ⚡

NBA Commissioner Adam Silver unveils the future. Watch this video. He takes an iPhone scan of sports commentator and retired NFL player Ahmad Rashad, then promptly drops him into some NBA game footage where he proceeds to dunk on the Lakers. ~ learn more

Apple Watch glucose monitor in the news once more. I’ve been saying for years that one day millions of consumers will wake up with easy access to glucose data, and it’ll be a remarkable opportunity for nutrition awareness. “The goal of this secret endeavor — dubbed E5 — is to measure how much glucose is in someone’s body without needing to prick the skin for blood. After hitting major milestones recently, the company now believes it could eventually bring glucose monitoring to market, according to people familiar with the effort.” ~ learn more

It’s all about that Chain of Thought. An emergent behavior of large language models: they are better able to respond to “chain of thought” prompts to reason step by step and derive more accurate answers. Google researchers: “We will show that sufficiently large language models can generate chains of thought if demonstrations of chain-of-thought reasoning are provided in the exemplars for few-shot prompting.” ~ learn more

And here come multimodal Chain of Thought. Amazon researchers paired text with images as input to drive LLM ability ever higher. And they did it with a model that’s only 770 million params (vs the 175 Billion in GPT-3.5). “Our method achieves new state-of-the-art performance on the ScienceQA benchmark, outperforming accuracy of GPT-3.5 by 16% and even surpassing human performance.” ~ learn more

better doing 🎯

What happens when we stop stereotyping each other? This is a nice short video that reinforces the benefits of gathering more data. ~ learn more

to your health ⚕

How to assess & improve all aspects of your fitness. This is a podcast featuring Dr. Andy Galpin, expert in human bioenergetics and muscle physiology. The link is to the show notes, which is a great place to start. He offers a comprehensive framework for answering the question “How do I know if I’m fit?” by bucketing physiological adaptations into 9 areas. ~ learn more

Drug expiration dates are mostly BS. “Eight long-expired medications with 15 different active ingredients were discovered in a retail pharmacy in their original, unopened containers: All had expired 28 to 40 years prior to analysis. … Twelve of the 14 drug compounds tested (86%) were present in concentrations at least 90% of the labeled amounts, the generally recognized minimum acceptable potency.” ~ learn more

Prices for surgical procedures within and outside hospital networks. “A total of 3195 hospitals reported prices and were included in this analysis. For 15 of the 16 procedures, the median negotiated price was significantly higher at facilities within networks compared with independent hospitals.” ~ learn more

retail therapy 💸

The state of the culture 2023. Instead of a State of the Union speech, “What [Ted Gioia would] really like is a “State of the Culture” speech—a hard-hitting look at music, writing, arts, media, movies, and all that. And delivered with brutal honesty.” Loaded with interesting facts. Two highlights: “In the last year 1.7 million books were self-published.” And, “only 28 books sold more than 500,000 copies last year—and eight of them were by the same romance writer.” ~ learn more

under the microscope 🔬

In a new theory, researchers suspect fructose is a driver of Alzheimer’s disease. “The researchers hypothesize that the effects of fructose and its byproduct, intracellular uric acid, are causing the build-up of proteins linked to Alzheimer's disease.” ~ learn more

thoughts of food 🍔

10 deceiving new names for high-fructose corn syrup. “Take General Mills’ Vanilla Chex, for example. It’s an updated version of the Chex cereal sold in most conventional grocery stores, and the front of the new box states that the product contains “no high fructose corn syrup.” However, if you turn the box around to read the ingredient list, you’ll see that HFCS was simply renamed as a new fructose isolate.” ~ learn more

big ideas 📚

Helion: a new way to achieve nuclear fusion. Their 6th generation reactor, Trenta, uses a safer fuel than other reactors and produces and reliable fusion once every 10 minutes. Their 7th generation prototype intends to scale up the frequency of fusion to every second and, critically, generate usable 60hz electricity. ~ learn more

on the blockchain ⛓

The capacity of Bitcoin’s Lightning Network recently surpassed an all-time high. “A Valkyrie Investments report states that LN adoption is picking up speed in emerging markets like South America and Africa, primarily due to efforts of the LN mobile payment application Strike.” ~ learn more

Yuga Labs accused of IP theft for trademarking BAYC wolf skull logo. “The iconic wolf skull logo of Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC), Yuga Labs’ premier nonfungible token (NFT) collection, was allegedly illegally trademarked without proper licenses. The image was originally released by a company specializing in drawing tutorials for children and beginners.” ~ learn more

thanks for reading!