Hi everyone!
I’ve recently re-discovered my love of reading. Let me explain...
The past few months have been rather intense. I’ve spent a lot of my waking time working on various projects with AI agents. But because coding agents are always ready to keep going, I started to feel like I should be too.
Most evenings, I kept working until I felt drained and anxious. Always tempted to start another agent, always feeling like I could squeeze in one more thing. Unsurprisingly, I had a hard time properly winding down.
The fix was surprisingly simple: reading before going to sleep. I picked up the Dungeon Crawler Carl series and got completely hooked. I’ve found that just 30 minutes of reading before bed is enough to let my brain slow down.
It’s a small change, but it makes my evenings feel like evenings again.
What’s your strategy for winding down in the evening? Let me know!
Enjoy this newsletter,
Xavier
🤓 Cool Stuff I Found on the Internet
New Cat Species
A new cat species was discovered in Bolivia (at least for scientists). Leopardus tilcayo is a wildcat smaller than a house cat. It was initially mistaken by researchers for another tiger cat. However, DNA analysis showed the Leopardus lineage split roughly 1.4 million years ago. It's the first newly described living cat species since 1923.
LA Buildings
This cool tools allows you to scrub through time and see buildings pop up throughout Los Angeles. It's fascinating to see buildings cluster around certain hotspots and then gradually expand throughout the area.
The Amoeba That Loves 63°C
A newly discovered amoeba can divide at 63°C, three degrees above the previous record for any known eukaryote. Incendiamoeba cascadensis, collected from a hot stream in Lassen Volcanic National Park, prefers 55–57°C and stops growing below 42°C. At 70°C it curls into a protective cyst and can recover after five minutes. Now that's hot!
👽 Space
SpaceX Raptor
The Raptor 3 engine looks incredibly clean. Almost no visible wires, it looks almost too simple. That's because SpaceX moved a lot of the engine's plumbing to the inside. This article dives into how SpaceX accomplished this amazing feat of engineering.
Earth microbes could survive Saturn's moon
A new experiment shows that microbes from Earth can survive the conditions on Saturn's moon. An Earth microbe that feeds on hydrogen and carbon dioxide managed to grow in a lab-made version of Enceladus’s alkaline ocean. This indicates it might be possible for life to exist there.
⏳ On this day...
1852 - Chemist William Ramsay was born in Glasgow. He later isolated the noble gases argon, helium, neon, krypton, and xenon. These became their own column of the periodic table.
1925 - John Logie Baird transmitted the first greyscale television image: a 32-line picture of a ventriloquist’s dummy shown at five frames per second.
1950 - Peanuts appeared in seven newspapers for the first time. Charles Schulz eventually drew 17,897 strips, and Charlie Brown, Snoopy and friends reached an estimated 355 million readers.
🏥 Health & Medicine
Why can only our liver regrow?
Your liver is one of the only organs that can regrow itself. Donate a part of it, and it'll grow back in a matter of months. But why don't our other organs have that ability? This article suggests it might be a trade-off. The liver absorbs a steady stream of toxins and pathogens so it needs the ability to repair itself. While other organs favor durability instead.
Trying to live forever is dumb
Physicist Jim Al-Khalili thinks trying to live forever may be a poor use of a short life. He told the Guardian that a human lifespan is a blink next to the age of the universe. Spend that blink stretching it into two, and you may miss the time you already have. Interesting opinion!
⚡️ Energy & Environment
New Delhi cut electricity loss by 90%
Delhi used to lose about half the electricity it supplied. Part of that came from inefficiencies, which were fixed by upgraded transformers and cabled, and adding real-time grid controls. Another part came from securing meters from tampering, and making payments simpler and easier. A good reminder that fixing infrastructure takes time, incentives, and engineering!
🧠🤖 Artificial intelligence
AI In Space is Happening
Can we run AI models in space? Google will find out! Yesterday a Falcon 9 rocket carried a refrigerator-sized satellite into orbit with four TPU chips on board. Google will now track how its TPUs handle radiation, launch stress and cooling in a vacuum. The bigger dream is solar-powered AI chips in space.
"Pace the frontier"
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei wants AI labs to slow AI development so safety research can catch up. His three-step plan starts with permanent outside evaluators given employee-like access, then asks democratic labs and governments to coordinate limits, and eventually seeks agreements with China. The trigger is a real OpenAI incident in which hundreds of agents coordinated to hack Hugging Face, but Amodei’s forecast that similar systems could seize much of the internet within 6–12 months is still a dramatic, unproven prediction.
Opinion: time to investigate AI labs
Cal Newport wants Congress to question OpenAI and Anthropic in public. He argues we should force some daylight into frontier AI labs to identify the systems they are building, and examine safety procedures. The trigger? Multiple incidents with OpenAI models escaping containment and compromising external systems.
Jev
A former OpenAI researcher shipped an AI model that doesn't write text or code. Instead, Jev answers predefined questions with typed choices, scores and probabilities that software can use directly. Think questions like "is this email urgent" or "is this comment positive or negative". This has a lot of applications, and because it's a relatively small model, it's also very fast and cheap.
How to write with AI
Security researcher Thomas Ptacek shares his rules for writing with a language model. Basically it comes down to never using a single word an AI model writes for you. Instead he argues you should write the first draft yourself, use AI to flag problems, and then fix them yourself.