Around the Web 36
The Next Pope 🇻🇦
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Pillars of Modern Civilization
(For books I have read, reviewed, or currently read, go to the end of the newsletter)
[Talking Points]
🏃🏿David Goggins X Israel Adesanya Training.
🥩Ketogenic Diet in Pancreatic Cancer Treatment.
⌨️Cursor Writes 1 Billion Lines of Accepted Code/Day
🎶Nigerian Students Sing the UEFA Champions league Anthem
🏠US: Homebuyers Need $114K Salary for Median-Priced Homes
🌍Sub Saharan Africa Has 67% of People Living in Extreme Poverty
🧑In 2025, If You Are Over 30, You Are Older than Most People in the World.
[Longer Reads/Watch]
[I]: 🔰 Missing Pages: An AI Assistant for Avid Readers.
Back story to an app I am currently working on with a friend called Missing Pages.
Here is the waitlist.
[II]: 💻 A.I. Is Changing How Silicon Valley Builds Start-Ups
The evolution is underway: more with less with AI. Here is a New York Times profile of Gamma, an AI design partner for presentations, websites, etc.
The Cofounder Grant Lee wrote about it on X:
The New York Times profiled a start-up with 28 employees serving nearly 50 million users. That company is us. The traditional startup playbook: raise massive funding, hire hundreds of employees, and worry about profitability "later." But there's another way. Everyone at Gamma could fit in a small restaurant. We're not just surviving—we've been profitable for 15+ consecutive months, with revenue growing month over month, and lifetime negative net burn (we have more money in the bank than we've raised). This isn't an accident. We've deliberately designed our organization to maximize impact per person. Instead of creating specialist silos, we hire versatile generalists who can solve problems across domains. Rather than building management hierarchies, we find player-coaches who both lead and execute. Our team leverages AI tools throughout our workflow - Claude for data analysis, Cursor for coding efficiency, NotebookLM for customer research synthesis. These aren't just productivity hacks; they're force multipliers. Examples: — When our growth PM needed better analytics, he didn't file a ticket with a data team—he built a self-serve system that anyone can use without SQL knowledge. — When our marketing lead needed to understand our customers better, she fed thousands of interactions into an LLM and created actionable personas that now guide our entire strategy. — When our design team needs to test a hypothesis, we create a rapid prototype and show it to our power users. What we're seeing isn't just about "doing more with less." It's about fundamentally changing what's possible per person. The most valuable employees aren't specialists who excel in narrow domains - they're resourceful problem-solvers who continuously expand their capabilities. This approach creates remarkable resilience. Since everyone understands multiple functions, we don't have single points of failure when someone leaves or moves to another project. If you're building today, the question isn't how quickly you can scale headcount … it's how much impact you can create with the smallest possible team. The future belongs to tiny teams of extraordinary people.
[III]: 🇻🇦The Next Pope
The first pope I knew was Pope John Paul II, but I wasn't particularly aware of him because I was quite young so “knew” is an exaggeration. I do recall his death being major news, and I vaguely remember the talk of an African Pope over the radio in my dad’s car, maybe Cardinal Arinze? While I wasn’t particularly interested in Catholicism (and hence the papacy) then, my appreciation for Catholicism grew after reading some of Pope Benedict's books such as this, this, & this; supplemented with plenty podcast. Now, because of this sequence of admittedly abbreviated events, I've become too interested in who becomes pope, and I have read perhaps an unhealthy quantity of material about who is who, and the goings-on. So here are a few. The best resource is this fantastic web page on the College of Cardinals. It provides in-depth profiles of Catholic cardinals-especially those considered potential future popes (“papabili”) - to help folks better understand their backgrounds, beliefs, and positions on key issues. The site features comprehensive biographical data, summaries of each cardinal’s qualities, detailed analysis of their work as bishops. It also includes a fairly detailed piece on the origin of cardinals. Another one on the role of present-day cardinals (which clarified my confusion with regards emeritus, curial, & diocesian status within the cardinalate). The one I enjoyed the most was on electing the pope. Interesting bit from the article:
In the 1970s, Pope Paul VI introduced the age limit of 80 for electors, and 120 as the recommended maximum number of voting cardinals. For a man to be validly elected pope, he must receive two-thirds of the votes. Pope John Paul II changed the rules in 1996 so that after 33 or 34 ballots without a two-thirds majority, a candidate could be elected by a simple majority.
But Benedict XVI reinstated the requirement for a two-thirds majority to elect a pope, reversing John Paul II’s change which had been viewed as a “radical” innovation compared to the two-thirds rule that had existed since 1179. Benedict’s amendment stated that if a deadlock persisted after 13 days of voting, the two top candidates would enter a runoff. He did this to prevent a situation where a majority bloc could push through a candidate by simply holding out until the 34th ballot when there would have been a simple majority. It was also felt that the change would guarantee the greatest possible consensus among the cardinals rather than a candidate who could win with just a narrow majority. Benedict’s reversal was a return to the historical norm.
I have read a few profiles about some of the papabili, written by John Allen of Crux: Parolin, Zuppi, Erdo, and Besungu. At the time of writing it appears profiles of the following priests have been added: Pizzaballa, Aveline, Tagle, Prevost, and Arborelius. They are running this “Papabile of the day" till the conclave begins. On the world's largest prediction market, Polymarket (at the time of writing) Cardinal Parolin is leading the pack, closely followed by the charismatic Tagle of the Philippines. Also see Ed Feser on pope’s first duty, profiles of African Cardinal electors, and the youngest priest in the college of cardinals (45 year old Cardinal?!).
[IV]: 🌎Ten Charts That Show How the World is Changing
In his Digital Native essay, Rex Woodbury uses a curated set of charts to visually narrate the significant transformations shaping our world. Prominent economic and technological shifts are clearly visible. The tech market, for example, is shifting focus, now prioritizing profitability and efficiency over unrestrained growth, marking a significant change from previous years. Echoing this recalibration, venture capital distributions to investors have slowed, indicating a tighter funding and exit environment for startups and their backers. At the same time, a powerful trend is the rapid acceleration of AI adoption, which is driving significant increases in web traffic and engagement for AI tools, signaling a major technological disruption.
Beyond core tech and finance, the charts illuminate evolving patterns in commerce, culture, and society. While e-commerce continues its expansion, startups like DoorDash are shown dominance in their sector. Within the digital media landscape, success and engagement are increasingly concentrated among the largest platforms and most popular creators, following a distinct power law, which will get accelerated with continued AI adoption. (See my essay: Winners Take All). This digital environment highlights how viral cultural phenomena can create substantial and measurable boosts for brand visibility (this was discussed in the context of Guinness recent sales boost). Finally, the data underscores distinct generational economic realities, as Gen Z confronts unique hurdles compared to previous generations, starkly illustrated by trends like lower relative homeownership rates.
[V]: 🦠Recipe for a Cell
What makes up a cell? I learnt many of these in college, and even more complicated stuff in grad school (most of my formal education is in biology), but this is refreshing stuff to read nevertheless. For example see this bit:
In general, however, the mass of an E. coli is about 1 picogram, or one one-trillionth of a gram. That’s astonishingly small, roughly equal to the weight of the DNA inside a single hummingbird cell.
Which molecules make up this mass?
About 70 percent is just water. The other 30 percent — the so-called “dry mass” — is composed of everything else: DNA, RNA, proteins, lipids, and ions. Surprisingly, DNA accounts for just 3 percent of this dry mass, yet encodes all the information needed for the cell to grow, divide, adapt, and evolve. Most of a cell’s dry mass (55 percent) is proteins, which dominate because they are the “executors” of cellular functions; they catalyze reactions, form structural scaffolds, and regulate gene expression. About 20 percent of the dry mass is RNA, 10 percent is lipids, and the rest is ions and signaling molecules.
…
building a functioning cell from scratch still remains one of biology’s most elusive goals. The challenge is not merely mechanical, either. Even if one gathers all the right molecules in the right quantities, arranging those molecules with sufficient precision to “create life” remains far beyond current capabilities.
This is, in part, because cells are dynamic. They move and change quickly. Sugar molecules fly through a cell at 250 miles per hour, and each protein is bombarded by 1013 water molecules every second. This dynamism is often overlooked in the methods used to study living cells. A list of ingredients is inherently static. The next step, then, is to capture how each piece moves and interacts. Only then might we turn our catalogs of parts into recipes for a cell.
Full essay.
[Books/Papers 📚]
Book(s) recently completed: [-]
What I am currently reading:
The Master and His Emissary [Link]
AI 2027 [Link]
Hands-on Guide to Fine-Tuning Large Language Models [Link] [Code]
The Mom Test [Link]
Administer Container in Azure [Link]
The Alchemist [Link]