P.S. You Should Know... | Issue #374
🇺🇸 Happy Memorial Day
my story 🚀
🙋♂️ I’ve been biding my time for this one: I just saved a ton of money on car insurance by switching to Geico. One nice thing about regulated industries like insurance is that the products are standardized to a high degree, making it easier to compare apples-to-apples. On the other hand, who needs the reams of paper that they seem to generate whether you want it or not.
🇺🇸 Wishing you all a great Memorial Day weekend. Thank you to all who have served (and still do!) to keep the rest of us safe.
fun facts 🙌
Jerry Seinfeld’s 2024 Duke commencement address. He reminds the kids to have a sense of humor, as it’s their “Stanley Cup water bottle on the brutal long hike of life.” ~ learn more
Shipbreaking photographs. “I looked upon the shipbreaking as the ultimate in recycling, in this case of the largest vessels ever made. It turned out that most of the dismantling was happening in India and Bangladesh so that's where I went.” ~ learn more
Connecting solar to the grid is harder than you think. “Inverter-based resources lack the physical inertia of traditional generators, making it more challenging to maintain grid frequency stability.” ~ learn more
tech, startups, internet ⚡
A grand unified theory of the AI hype cycle. “Each of these cycles has been larger and lasted longer than the last, and I want to be clear: each cycle has produced genuinely useful technology. … There is an initial burst of rapid improvement, followed by gradual improvement, followed by a plateau. Initial promises imply or even state outright “if we pour more {compute, RAM, training data, money} into this, we’ll get improvements forever!” The reality is always that these strategies inevitably have a limit, usually one that does not take too long to find.” ~ learn more
Lessons learned from studying 4,000+ YC companies. “For the analysis, I used an LLM to embed the companies' value propositions in a vector space, ran a clustering algorithm on top of the embeddings, manually analyzed the results, and used ChatGPT to edit the draft. The conclusions are surprisingly elegant and powerful.” ~ learn more
better doing 🎯
Let them compete. “Around 2005, Jobs faced a crucial decision. Should he give the task of developing the device’s software to the team that built the iPod, which wanted to build a Linux-based system? Or should he entrust the project to the engineers who had revitalized the software foundation of the Macintosh? … Rather than pick an approach right away, however, Jobs pitted the teams against each other in a bake-off.” ~ learn more
Growth hacking doesn’t work as advertised. Andrew Chen wrote a post called “Growth Hacker is the VP of Marketing” a decade ago, predicting a sea change in the skills for and approach to successful marketing. For a while, he seemed to be right. “I originally had hoped to find a new scientific process to finding product/market fit but in the end mostly found new tools/processes that mostly helped big products get even bigger.” ~ learn more
Do you really care? A message for parents. “It seems like it’s really important to you. That the door not be slammed. That the chores be done a certain way. That everything be put away immediately. That feet go on the ground, not the furniture. But the truth is, you don’t actually care about the things themselves. You don’t.” ~ learn more
to your health ⚕
Dexcom’s plans for over-the-counter CGMs. “Dexcom plans to first sell Stelo on a website through individual purchases or a cash-pay subscription model. Sayer said the company started with this avenue instead of a pharmacy to provide more control at launch and allow Dexcom to better track utilization patterns.” ~ learn more
under the microscope 🔬
Brain aging study of nutrients in 100 people. “When examining the cognitive data, the team found two types of brain aging: slower-than-accepted and accelerated. When they combined the cognitive data with the nutritional measurements, they found a certain nutritional profile clearly linked to those with slower brain aging.” ~ learn more
A new adjustable filter that could enable the next generation of wireless communications. “Wireless devices use different filters for different frequencies, with the effect that covering all frequencies or bands requires large numbers of filters that take up substantial space. (The typical smartphone includes upwards of 100 filters, to ensure that signals from different bands don't interfere with one another.)” ~ learn more
Scaling deep learning for materials discovery. If anyone who understands material science well would like to tutor me a bit, I would be grateful! “Our work represents an order-of-magnitude expansion in stable materials known to humanity. Stable discoveries that are on the final convex hull will be made available to screen for technological applications, as we demonstrate for layered materials and solid-electrolyte candidates. Of the stable structures, 736 have already been independently experimentally realized.” ~ learn more
thoughts of food 🍔
New frozen pizzas designed for Ozempic customers. “The world’s biggest food company said it developed the new products with more protein, iron and calcium for people taking the wildly popular appetite-suppressing drugs, called GLP-1 agonists.” ~ learn more
big ideas 📚
EU’s dependency on imports to reach its green energy ambitions. “In our work at the EU’s Joint Research Centre (JRC), we showed that in the case of many of the strategic clean energy technologies, the bloc is entirely dependent on single sources – most often China – for raw materials, and also for other segments of the value chain.” ~ learn more
on the blockchain ⛓
The sea change on crypto regulation. There’s been a spurt of recent news from the US regulators that legitimizes crypto markets. “Why is this happening? I see three main factors at play….” ~ learn more