UL NO. 410: The Immigration/Identity Security Risk, Super Soldier Pentagon Talk, Okta&Me Updates, Teachable Agents

👉 Continue reading online to avoid the email cutoff issue 👈

Unsupervised Learning
is a Security, AI, and Meaning-focused podcast that looks at how best to
thrive as humans in a post-AI world. It combines original ideas, analysis,
and mental models to bring not just the news—but why it matters, and how
to respond.

Greetings!

I’m settling into December and have been hacking on stuff like a fiend!

• Improving the explanation of
  what you get when you sign up as a UL Member, and the UL Member portal for where you get it. A
  buddy basically said it wasn’t super clear what all came with it—like I
  didn’t hype it up enough and show all the benefits—which I agreed with
  after I looked at it, and I was already working on improving the portal.
  It’s better now!

• Making progress on our main AI product, now with a completely new stack.

• Building that project I teased about a few weeks back. It’s my
  first Go executable project, so it’s taking a bit. Super excited about
  it though!

• I wrote a sick new AI tool that takes any video and provides a
  full set of transcripts and topics like this one for
  Mark Manson’s Convo With David Perell.

A sample from my new Chapters tool

If you know any YouTube creators who need auto-generated, high-quality
chapter timestamps, please let me know. This normally takes hours of tedious
work for a human, and it’s pretty hard to do well.
REACH OUT IF YOU KNOW SOMEONE

• Started a new RPGLit book, which is very RPTLit.

And I’m hyped to be seeing two friends this week that I’ve not seen in many
months! I hope you’re into something good as well, but also trying to power
down a bit for the holidays.

Let’s jump in!

MY WORK

Immigration and National/Racial Identity is Becoming the Top Global
Security Issue
Starting off with a light topic, this new essay is about when culture
wars create identity wars, and we get predictable results in the form of
authoritarianism and atrocity.
READ IT

👉 Continue reading online to avoid the email cutoff issue 👈

SECURITY

Okta just revealed that the recent hack compromised data on all its
support customers, meaning the ones who had contacted support and had been
using that service.
MORE
|
MORE 

The 23andMe breach also just expanded. They’re now saying it was “a
significant number of files”, and it was genetic data as well.
MORE

💡This is why I’m so skeptical whenever I hear, “But no ______ data was
affected.” I’m always waiting for the other bodies to drop. I feel like we
won’t know the actual impact for a number of months, so I consider all the
initial updates to be preliminary. Same with LastPass, and countless
others.

Meta and Google are calling out China for thousands of fake accounts
spreading content across multiple platforms.
Meta’s report
detailed the removal of 4,789 accounts posing as Americans, which later
shifted to impersonating Indian profiles to spread disinformation about the
Dalai Lama.
MORE
|
META’S REPORT

Sponsor

Why the Agile Framework and AI are a Match Made in IT Heaven

Download this eBook
and learn how the Agile project management approach and AI together can
help you solve nearly any IT problem.

Inside, you’ll discover:

• Why the Agile framework is so powerful

• How developers can create more precise and effective AI prompts with the help of the Agile framework

• A sample AI prompt for developing a PowerShell script

👉go.automox.com/agile-ai-ebook👈

Download Now

   

Meta’s has outright banned AI-generated political ads. For all countries.
Everywhere. The decision affects ads related to politics, elections,
housing, employment, credit, social issues, health, pharmaceuticals, and
financial services. MORE

Google’s RETVec
is Gmail’s new tool to fight spam and malicious emails, using a
multilingual text vectorizer that catches tricks like homoglyphs and
typos. The integration of RETVec has boosted Gmail’s spam detection by 38%
and cut false positives by nearly 20%, while also slashing computational
costs significantly. MORE
|
THE PROJECT

The USS Carney and commercial vessels were attacked with missiles by Houthi
rebels in the Red Sea. Balsy. They downed 3 drones as part of the attacks.
MORE

Vulnerabilities:

• 🚨Chrome Zero-Day Patched — Google just released an emergency update for
  Chrome’s fifth exploited zero-day this year. | CRITICAL | CVE-2023-6345
  |
  MORE

• 🚨Zyxel NAS Vulnerabilities — Zyxel’s NAS devices have critical flaws
  allowing unauthenticated command execution. | CRITICAL | CVE-2023-4474 |
  CVSS Score: 9.8
  MORE

Incidents:

• ⚠️ North Texas Water Hit — North Texas Municipal Water District’s
  systems, including phones, were disrupted by a cyberattack. | SEVERITY:
  HIGH | RESPONSE: The district has not yet disclosed any specific
  response measures.
  MORE

• ⚠️ Dollar Tree Data Compromise — ZeroedIn’s breach hit about 2
  million people, including Dollar Tree and Family Dollar employees. |
  SEVERITY: HIGH | RESPONSE: ZeroedIn notified affected customers and may
  face a class action lawsuit.
  MORE

📖 Okta Threat Hunting Guide — Part 2 of the Okta Threat Hunting
series is out, offering advanced techniques for log auditing. | by /u/Or1rez
MORE

📺TALK: Prompt Injection Exploits, CONFERENCE: Ekoparty
VIDEO

🧱PROJECT: RETVec: Gmail’s New Shield
MORE

There was a wild panel of military leaders called
BLACK SWAN: DAWN OF THE SUPER SOLIDER (their caps). And the topic was
basically all the different ways we are working to make people into super
soldiers. Surreal since they’re so casual about the conversation, and I just
showed my girl all the Bourne movies, which included the modified soldiers
one.
VIDEO
| (Members) Check the #extractwisdom channel |
GET ACCESS to the EXTWIS of the VIDEO

👉 Continue reading online to avoid the email cutoff issue 👈

TECHNOLOGY

Sam Altman’s back as OpenAI’s CEO, and things seem to be settling
down. Not sure what they’ll even do for Season 5 of the
Sam Altman show. Microsoft also snagged a board observer seat.
MORE
|
MORE
|
MORE

💡Analysis continues for exactly what happened, but I am still working
under the theory that it was (basically) Accels vs. Doomers. And the Verge has Altman saying Q* was a leak (screenshot). All this keeping in mind that Sam isn’t pure Accel, and not everyone
who thinks he should slow down is a Doomer. Still, I think that was (and
continues to be) the primary dynamic. VERGE SCREENSHOT

An anonymous poll showed Google’s productivity is suffering, with 71% of
software engineers working six hours or less daily and/or juggling multiple
jobs without hitting a 40-hour week. How did Microsoft become sexy and
Google has become stodgy? I think the answer is Satya.
MORE

💡The other thing hurting Google is that they’re building products using a
“throw it at the wall and hope it becomes another GMail” strategy, rather
than building a Life Ecosystem Platform like Apple.

The Black Cabs in London are coming to Uber. Big win for Uber here.
MORE

HUMANS

Ireland is experiencing major riots around immigration. A stabbing by
someone who seems to be originally from Algeria spawned
the riots, and far-right groups in the country are calling for civil war.
Conor McGregor is in the fray as well, making a number of anti-immigration
statements and calling for immigration change. People are also hoping he
runs for office.
MORE

The U.S. economy showed a 5.2% annualized increase in GDP, surpassing both
the initial estimate of 4.9% and economists’ revised predictions. Wait until
all this AI-powered creation starts kicking in.
MORE

💡Predicting AI-based GDP changes is really difficult, and not just because
it’s about the future (lol). The issue is that AI both giveth and taketh
away. It’s going to make everyone more productive, but also remove jobs.
Many companies will go under because they’re replaced by AI offerings, but
there will be a ton of new startups too. So how does that all net out?
Nobody knows. My guess is we end up with way more productivity, but if a massive portion of the population loses their jobs, who’s
going to buy all the new stuff? Will it just be the top 20% making stuff
and selling it to the top 20%?

Bitcoin just passed $40,000, which is the highest it has been since April
last year. People are asking if crypto is back now, but I’ve yet to see
solid use cases that aren’t Bitcoin (alternate money storage), or get-rich
schemes. MORE

Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince is reportedly driving a secret initiative to
spike global oil demand, undermining climate action efforts.
MORE

🔥Ozempic’s rise is reshaping spending habits and could actually boost the
economy. GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic are leading to less spending on food but
more on lifestyle and fitness. This is something to watch closely.
MORE

Extraordinary housing costs are forcing divorced couples to remain living
together because they can’t afford separate homes. This reminds me of bad
job markets where people aren’t leaving a company because they can’t. And
then when the economy improves you have a whole bunch of people resign.
How many people are in relationships they don’t want to be simply because
they don’t have the option to leave? MORE

China is building nuclear reactors faster than anyone. Also, missiles,
ships, and pretty much everything else as well. Including infrastructure.
They’re just winning at preparing for the future. All we do here is fight
while they prepare for a post-US-dominated world.
MORE

👉 Continue reading online to avoid the email cutoff issue 👈

NOTES

A bit of vulnerability here: I’ve been slacking on my workout/exercise
routine. A good amount of table tennis, but not enough walking and not
enough weights. This is partially on purpose (relaxing a bit for December)
but not really. I’m still eating well and getting tons done, but my energy
levels would be even higher if I were on-plan! Do better, me.

DISCOVERY

⚒️AutoGen’sTeachable Agents — Like Autogen, and also from Microsoft, but as
you talk to a given Agent it learns your responses and stores them in
context for future conversations!
MORE

🔬 Meditron LLM Release — Meditron’s new open-source LLMs are
trained on a vast medical corpus and outperform other models in medical
tasks.
MORE

🚀 Reaction Replaces Fail2ban — A new tool called Reaction aims
to offer a more efficient alternative to fail2ban for server protection. |
by xvello |
MORE

🖥️ Yabai — A macOS utility that turns your desktop into a tiling window
manager for better space management. | by koekeishiya
MORE

📈 Say This Not That Chart — A handy reference for anyone looking to polish
their professional communication. It’s about choosing the right words at
work.
MORE

🗒️ SMART Goals Template — Ditch those vague aspirations. This template
guides you to set Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound
goals.
MORE

Digital car keys are finally catching on.
MORE

AI and the Rise of Mediocrity
MORE

This guy created documentation for everything in his house.
MORE

The Great Deshittification
MORE

D&D is definitely back.
MORE

Adobe bought Figma, and people aren’t happy.
MORE

Lego-fy Yourself
MORE

Why Life Doesn’t Really Exist
MORE

A negative review of our UL Book Club book of the month.
MORE

RECOMMENDATION OF THE WEEK

If January is the time we think about the upcoming year, let December be
your time to reach out to old friends. Here’s a text you can use for
people you haven’t talked to in a while, but that you wish you had.

Hey there, just saying Hi. We never chat and that’s on me for not reaching
out. I love you, and I hope you’re well. And I vow to send more texts until
we’re annoyed or excited enough to get on the phone. 😀 

Copy that and spend like 10 minutes going through your contact list and
sending it to the few dozen people who you care about and have lost contact
with.

Some portion of those people could really benefit from hearing you right
now, and they’re just a text away.

APHORISM OF THE WEEK

❝  

The only way to have a friend is to be one.

 Ralph Waldo Emerson
 

Thank you for reading.

UL is a personal and strange combination of security, tech, AI, and lots of
deeply human content. And because it’s so diverse, it’s harder for it to go
as viral as something more niche.

So if you know someone weird like us, please share it with them. 🫶 

Share UL with someone like us…

Yours,