I’m still reading Tom Holland’s book on WWII, and there’s so much great stuff in there. From little personal stories to bios of insanely impressive people. Let’s start with one of them.

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The CEO who rebuilt America’s army

William Knudsen was an immigrant from Denmark who moved to New York and briefly worked for Ford before being picked up to lead Chevrolet’s revival. If Ford popularized the assembly line, Knudsen perfected it. Eventually, he became the CEO of General Motors.

But Roosevelt convinced him to drop this role and salary to work on rebuilding America’s war machine, which had been dismantled after World War I.

William became the only civilian in U.S. history directly commissioned into the Army as a lieutenant general. His job was not battlefield command but industrial conversion: he took aircraft production from under 3,000 planes in 1939 to more than 300,000 by the end of World War II.

As Knudsen once said:

"We won because we smothered the enemy in an avalanche of production, the like of which he had never seen, nor dreamed possible."

Curiosity’s 13 Years of Software Hacks Keeps It Alive on Mars

NASA has a habit of keeping its drones and gadgets alive for decades. The Martian rover Curiosity’s mission was scheduled to last 2 years. It’s been going on for 13 years because JPL keeps teaching the aging robot new tricks.

It had two computers. One failed a long time ago due to memory issues, then the second started giving scary errors. So JPL dumped A’s obsolete backup software copies and reused that tiny but reliable memory as a new mini–file system, turning A into a stripped‑down “lifeboat” computer in case B fails again.

New CRISPR Technique Selectively Shreds Untreatable Cancer Cells

There’s a new genetic therapy approach can eliminate cancer cells. It basically turns a cancer mutation into a self-destruct signal. It covers the pattern found in nearly half of cancers, including some ovarian, pancreatic, and lung cancers that are notoriously hard to treat with drugs.

CRISPR is originally a natural bacterial defense mechanism that can adjust the DNA, so we now adapted it for targeted gene modification.

In a few decades, cancer will be largely solved. Finally.

How Notion got notion.com

For years, Notion used the Somalia TLD. Here’s the story of how they acquired notion.com.

The seller wasn’t interested at first. But they figured out he was a Grateful Dead fan. So the team called Ron Conway, Notion’s investor and one of the most famous VCs, and asked if he could set up a meeting with the bad. And he did. Got him 15 minutes.

In the end, the seller chose equity. Probably a good choice.

What can a neuron compute?

Neural networks were inspired by human neurons. But the biological once are much more complex than a crude digital copy we created.

A single cortical neuron is much more like a tiny computer with a branching internal architecture. By building a digital twin, researchers showed that even a single modeled biological neuron can classify cats vs. dogs, recognize spoken words, and solve parity tasks that normally require an entire network.

The Analog Revival Did Not Take Place

Eugene Healey argues that the trend behind all these iPods, wired headphones, and ancient film cameras isn’t real. That they became props inside the same attention economy they supposedly reject. If your work, date, and consume everything through screens, analog provides an image of escape — but not the escape itself.

I’m certainly curious about this, especially since I’m both partially to blame and totally agree with him.