P.S. You Should Know... | Issue #371
Peacocking
my story 🚀
fun facts 🙌
When do we stop finding new music? I came across a similar story a few years ago. This one has some interesting charts, sourced from Spotify data and more. “A New York Times analysis of Spotify data revealed that our most-played songs often stem from our teenage years, particularly between the ages of 13 and 16.” ~ learn more
Pet owner sends her own DNA to pet testing service. “In a follow-up story, investigative news team in Boston sends a reporter’s cheek swab sample to the same pet DNA testing lab: report states the reporter is part Malamute, Shar Pei, and Labrador Retriever” ~ learn more
Talk to me human. A new game designed to help you practice talking your way out of sticky situations. “Just as you turn the last corner to the lobby to leave work at 2pm, you run into The Boss. You’re clearly on your way out. You have to come up with something believable so she’ll let you go.” This seems like an excellent use for language models! ~ learn more
oh, austin 🤠
Austin had an overdose outbreak. This is insane. Published on Wednesday: “Since Monday, April 29, medics have responded to 75 opioid overdose calls in Austin and Travis County. According to the medical examiner, eight deaths are suspected to be opioid-related.” ~ learn more
tech, startups, internet ⚡
Microsoft’s VASA-1 can deepfake a person with one photo and one audio track. This is insane. “The examples also include some more fanciful generations, such as Mona Lisa rapping to an audio track of Anne Hathaway performing a "Paparazzi" song on Conan O'Brien.” ~ learn more
The business of wallets. “There are classically two ways to make money in financial product innovation: you charge the customer for stocks, an ongoing and often percentage-based fee to custody their assets for an arbitrarily long time, or you charge them for flows, a per-instance and sometimes scaling-with-size fee on transactions specifically. Very frequently, from the perspective of a single user, stocks are priced and flows are free, or vice versa.” ~ learn more
What can language models actually do? Text transformation! Compression, expansion, and translation are the key mechanisms. “These are manifestations of their outward behavior. From there, we can infer a property of their psychology—the underlying thinking process that creates their behavior: Remixing” ~ learn more
better doing 🎯
Show them, don’t tell them. “This was a pivotal moment for Christensen. He realized that even though business leaders often wanted direct and clear advice, it was actually far more effective to show rather than tell.” ~ learn more
Executive gravitas. Someone shared this video with me because a specific point in it hit home for them. They had fallen into the trap of comparing themselves to famous CEOs, and along the way lost sight of their own merits and how those stacked up against the world at large and even their peer group. “The Lazy CEO Podcast, host Jim Schleckser discusses the concept of executive gravitas. He explains executive gravitas is about exuding confidence, trust, and credibility professionally. It goes beyond just the content of what you say and encompasses how you present yourself.” ~ learn more
How to acknowledge your weaknesses in a job interview. “In 1987, the Chicago Sun-Times had to replace their beloved advice columnist, Ann Landers. A young journalist, Jeff Zaslow, was writing an article about the search and decided to throw his hat in the ring. “How could you have the audacity to give advice?” an interviewer scoffed. “I may only be 28,” Zaslow replied, “but I have the wisdom of a 29-year old.” ~ learn more
to your health ⚕
Walmart will exit the health clinic business. "Healthcare is expensive to run. We were finding that the increased labor and operating costs environment, like with reimbursement, both public and private, made it difficult (to run the business) and obvious we had to close," Walmart spokeswoman Marilee McInnis told Reuters. ~ learn more
How to die in good health. Peter Attia is the golden boy of the longevity medicine movement. This is a relatively balanced article written by a doctor who spent some time with him recently. “The increasing obsession with longevity has inspired a backlash. Many in the life-extension movement are quacks or hacks who peddle pills, potions, and false promises; longevity skeptics tend to see the loss of our capacities as something to accept, not avoid.” ~ learn more
under the microscope 🔬
mRNA cancer vaccine reprograms immune system to tackle glioblastoma. “The demonstration that making an mRNA cancer vaccine in this fashion generates similar and strong responses across mice, pet dogs that have developed cancer spontaneously, and human patients with brain cancer is a really important finding, because oftentimes we don’t know how well the preclinical studies in animals are going to translate into similar responses in patients.” The next step after this 4-person trial is a 24-person trial. Balancing safety vs quick deployment of this miraculous cure seems like a tough choice. ~ learn more
Detecting cancer in minutes with just a drop of dried blood. “In preliminary experiments, the tool was able to distinguish between patients with diagnosed pancreatic, gastric or colorectal cancer and people without cancer — and the analysis took just minutes. By detecting certain chemicals in blood, the test could identify when a patient had cancer around 82% to 100% of the time, researchers say.” ~ learn more
Just remember that humans are still just learning the basics. “Researchers at MIT have discovered a new phenomenon: that light can cause evaporation of water from its surface without the need for heat.” ~ learn more
big ideas 📚
Battery storage becomes biggest source of supply in evening peak in California. This matters because it demonstrates an effective way to smooth out intermittent solar and wind energy. “A landmark event occurred in the US on Tuesday night when battery storage become for the first time the largest source of supply in the California grid, which delivers electricity to the world’s fifth biggest economy and is one of the world’s biggest grids.” ~ learn more
on the blockchain ⛓
The rise of crypto’s billion dollar zombies. This Forbes article takes an aggressive stance on the value of many blockchains. “With bitcoin soaring once again, blockchains are suddenly much more valuable. More than 50 of them are now worth over $1 billion—despite many having few users.” Yet, it’s possible for this article’s message to be generally correct and specifically wrong if any of these blockchains manage to innovate along a relevant dimension. But certainly much of crypto is a steaming pile of trash. ~ learn more
profiles of people 🚶
Daniel S. Loeb and Mr. Pink. “Wherever you come down, Dan Loeb is worthy of study. Over the past 26 years, he has turned $3.3 million in start-up capital into a hedge fund with more than $20 billion. He personally pioneered a new era of activist investing. He has kept pace with the market’s rate of change, learning and growing in order to succeed even as the landscape has shifted repeatedly under his feet—yielding remarkable consistency.” ~ learn more
The many minds of Marvin Minsky. “Although he sometimes pretended to be a hard-core reductionist, AI visionary Marvin Minsky was actually a scientific romantic, for whom the quest for knowledge mattered more than the knowledge itself.” ~ learn more