P.S. You Should Know... | Issue #369

To the zoo!

my story 🚀

We trekked a bit out of town to the San Antonio Zoo, which was a great time!

💻 Mac test drive update. I’ve decided to keep it! For those who are curious, I’ll share a bit of my experience here. The app I was most excited for was iMessage, and that alone made it worthwhile. Also, and this feels weird to say, the switch has made the computer fun again. I still can’t quite figure out why or how. Maybe I had stopped exploring and trying new things on my PC after so many years.

It’s not all roses and sunshine. I’m still fighting an uphill battle to reset my keyboard shortcut habits, especially in Excel. Window management is relatively clunky. I also experienced a fluke memory leak bug that left my geekiest friends and the apple store folks scratching their heads, but only once. On balance, I’m still glad to make the switch.

I want to thank those of you who took the time to share your app suggestions. Raycast (a supercharged command prompt) and Cleanshot (a supercharged screenshot tool) are two standouts that I now use constantly. I also switched from Chrome to Arc Browser, driven away by the bad UX of multiple profiles in Chrome. Once I committed to Arc, I began to embrace it because of how slick many of its features are. Also, huge thanks to the friend who took the time to screenshare with me and insisted on certain configuration pointers (e.g. auto-hide doc and snap it to the side instead of the bottom) to get the most out of my machine.

fun facts 🙌

A houseplant genetically modified to glow in the dark. “Discover the allure of the Firefly Petunia. A beautiful plant by day, it unveils mesmerizing luminescence after dusk.” ~ learn more

A real life Weekend at Bernie’s. “Police in Brazil have detained a woman suspected of wheeling a dead man, who she said was her uncle, to a bank to withdraw a four-figure loan.” ~ learn more

Fit over 40. “I found a guy who goes around Miami asking insanely fit people over 40: • What they eat • What workouts they do • What supplements they take. Here are my top 8” ~ learn more

There’s no such thing as a tree (phylogenetically). “So you’ve heard about how fish aren’t a monophyletic group? You’ve heard about carcinization, the process by which ocean arthropods convergently evolve into crabs? You say you get it now? Sit down. Sit down. Shut up. Listen. You don’t know nothing yet. “Trees” are not a coherent phylogenetic category. On the evolutionary tree of plants, trees are regularly interspersed with things that are absolutely, 100% not trees.” ~ learn more

oh, austin 🤠

No tax financing for waterfront development in Austin. Although the vision for the development looks super cool to me, this seems like the right call. “A Travis County District judge has ordered the City of Austin to scrap a plan to divert a portion of property taxes from general city services and use it to fund infrastructure projects — such as roads, sidewalks and affordable housing — along the south shores of Lady Bird Lake.” ~ learn more

tech, startups, internet ⚡

Mark Zuckerberg interview where he comes off quite likable. With podcast host Dwarkesh Patel, he discusses Llama 3 (and 4) and the how regulations around energy production could become the rate-limiter for AI because data centers are power hungry. ~ learn more

Malloy, modern open source language for analyzing, transforming, and modeling data. If you have spent anywhere close to as many hours writing SQL code as me, you’ll probably love it as much as I did. The first 7 minutes set the stage for how SQL can be so cumbersome. Then, Lloyd Tabb introduces Malloy. ~ learn more

Compounding until inflection. A tale of two startup biotechs strategies. “All value comes from clinical products. But it’s only possible to build a generational biotech company with a foundational technology platform capable of developing multiple products.” ~ learn more

AI-enabled services are opening a whole new market. “Compared to software businesses, services performed by humans tend to be low margin, hard to scale exponentially, lumpy in revenue, etc. etc. There are many cautionary tales. But change is afoot… hastened by AI, cracking open new, huge opportunities for founders brave enough to go against the tired wisdom.” ~ learn more

better doing 🎯

How to speak more confidently and persuasively. This is an interesting interview with Matt Abrahams, who teaches a class on strategic communication at Stanford. I liked this framework because it’s easy to remember: “What? So What? Now What?” ~ learn more

A word to the resourceful. One of Paul Graham’s essays from 2012: “A year ago I noticed a pattern in the least successful startups we'd funded: they all seemed hard to talk to. It felt as if there was some kind of wall between us. I could never quite tell if they understood what I was saying.” ~ learn more

Lindley’s paradox. On null effects in science. “What's more convincing? p = 0.04 in a sample of 10 or p = 0.04 in a sample of 1,000,000?” ~ learn more

to your health ⚕

How Veradigm (fka Allscripts) is making a huge bet on AI. “Now interim CEO Yin Ho has an audacious plan to use the $140 million acquisition of AI startup ScienceIO to tap into its one major competitive advantage over giants like Epic: data.” ~ learn more

under the microscope 🔬

Data is not available upon request. Oh, my! “Among articles stating that data was available upon request, only 17% shared data upon request. The presence of Data Availability Statements was not associated with higher rates of data sharing(p= .55), indicating a lack of adherence to journals' policies.” ~ learn more

Things could be better. Science does not have to be written with dry language and locked away behind inaccessible journals. Adam Mastroianni proves the point by publishing the results of eight studies he conducted. “It goes like this: when people imagine how things could be different, they almost always imagine how things could be better.” ~ learn more

A critical take on Lantern Bio’s cavity-defying microbes. In January of 2024 I shared a post about Lantern Bio, who’s “product is a genetically modified bacterium which infects your mouth, outcompetes all the tooth-decay-causing bacteria, and doesn’t cause tooth decay itself”. This data scientist makes the valid point that it’s a little sketchy for folks to talk about this therapy as if it works before any human clinical trial evidence exists. Because, well, lots of things that should work end up failing in trials. ~ learn more

big ideas 📚

Bill Gurley speaks from the heart on regulatory capture. He shares the story of his Washington DC lawyer advising him to get some friends in a room together for a visit from a congressman. He was early in his investing career and the startup he had backed needed support! ~ learn more

profiles of people 🚶

Rags-to-riches of the century: Francis Ngannou. “His story even starts like a folk tale. Poor even by the standards of his native Cameroon, Francis lived with his grandmother in a one-room, brick-and-dirt house in the village of Batié. From the age of 10, he worked in a local sand mine to supplement their meager income, but still often missed school because of lack of tuition, or was thrown out for being without a notebook and pen.” ~ learn more

thanks for reading!