Unsupervised Learning Newsletter NO. 385

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!,

This week I’m thinking a lot about
operationalization and pipelines. Like, if you’re a business, it doesn’t
matter what your best humans can do once or three times. What matters is
what you can do as a process, with consistently high quality.

What
are the one-offs in your life that should be turned into pipelines?

Have a great week!

🤖 AI’s next big thing: Digital Assistants 🔓 Gmail Validation Flaw:
Scammers exploit security feature 🚗 Toyota Cloud Leak: 260,000 Japanese
service records exposed 🛡️ AI Defenders: Protecting your AI models 🤖🗣️
ChatGPT Webinar: Dos and Don’ts for Company Security 🔧 Jetpack Jank: Urgent
update for WordPress plugin 🛰️ Sanctioned Satellite Hacking: DEFCON’s space
challenge 💻 NVIDIA Superchip: Game-changing GPU technology 🎓 Andrew’s Mini
AI Courses: Generative AI, Diffusion Models, and Langchain 🧠 Google AI
Courses: 9 free courses for everyone 📄 New AI Paper: ByteFormer for
classification without decoding 🏢 Meta’s Office Return: 3 days a week
starting in September

MY WORK

AI’s Next Big Thing is Digital Assistants
My recent essay about the next big thing in the AI-ification of our
lives.
MORE

SECURITY NEWS

Gmail Validation Flaw
Google’s new Gmail security feature is being exploited by hackers to
scam users, undermining the email service’s security reputation.

–
Gmail’s blue checkmark sender verification system is being tricked by
scammers
– Cybersecurity engineer Chris Plummer discovered the flaw and
alerted Google
– Google initially dismissed the issue, but later
acknowledged it and listed it as a top priority fix

Stay vigilant
as the verification system remains broken until Google resolves the issue.
MORE

Toyota Cloud Leak, Again
Toyota faces another cloud leak, exposing 260,000 Japanese service
records and customer data from other Asian and Oceanic countries.

–
Toyota apologizes for yet another cloud leak due to misconfigured cloud
environment
– 260,000 Japanese service records have been exposed since
2015, along with customer data from other countries
– Company claims no
evidence of data misuse and has implemented a system to monitor cloud
environments
MORE

AI Defenders
Defending your AI models is crucial, and this article provides
valuable insights and advice on how to do it effectively.

• The article discusses the importance of protecting AI models from
  adversarial attacks and data poisoning.

• It highlights the need for robust security measures, such as monitoring
  and validating input data.

• The author emphasizes the role of AI explainability in detecting and
  mitigating potential threats.

• Advice includes investing in AI security tools, training staff on AI
  risks, and collaborating with security experts.

• Regular audits and updates to AI models are also recommended to maintain
  their integrity and effectiveness. MORE

Sponsor

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 As generative AI tools like ChatGPT evolve, compliance experts are left
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Join Hyperproof
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and similar technologies.

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📜 Security policy considerations
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Insights into enterprise risk management frameworks
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Jetpack Jank
WordPress has issued an urgent update to fix a critical flaw in the
widely-used Jetpack plugin, affecting over five million sites.

–
The vulnerability was discovered during an internal security audit and
affects an API present in the plugin since version 2.0, released in November
2012.
– Authors on a site could potentially use this flaw to manipulate
any files in the WordPress installation.
– 102 new versions of Jetpack
have been released to remediate the bug, and there’s no evidence of
exploitation in the wild yet.
– Users are advised to update their
Jetpack plugin to the latest version to avoid potential threats.
MORE

Sanctioned Satellite Hacking
The US government is asking hackers at DEFCON to attack their
Moonlighter satellite while it’s in space. This is a satellite specifically
designed to be a hacking sandbox in space. It does feel a little like giving
pentesters access to the test environment when it looks nothing like prod,
though. MORE

TECHNOLOGY NEWS

🔥 New AI Paper: Tree of Thoughts 🌳
A new paper came out about a better way to do prompting that works
better than all previous methods. This one works by exploring multiple
options down multiple steps, but it uniquely has the ability to go backward
and try other paths if the current path results in a dead-end. In other
words it’s able to explore multiple steps down multiple options and find the
best match/answer. Even better, it shipped with a Github repo that gives
examples! Really powerful. I’ll be implementing this very soon in my
platform.
MORE |
PAPER |
GITHUB REPO

NVIDIA Superchip
NVIDIA just changed the GPU game forever with its new Grace Hopper
GPU chip. 

• Each module has 576GB of memory, unified between the CPU and GPU

• Uses low-power DDR memory

• 72 CPU cores, 900 GB/sec cross-chip bandwidth

• 4 PETAflops 

• They’re going to connect 8 of them together using NVLink, with
  900GB/second between them

• And they’re connecting 32 of those together to create 1 exaflop in a
  single system

• The entire thing functions as one GPU!

Holy crap this is going to be insane. And yes, I’m investing in NVIDIA.
ANNOUNCEMENT |
YOUTUBE ANNOUNCEMENT TALK

Andrew’s Mini AI Courses
Andrew Ng has released three short courses on Generative AI,
Diffusion Models, and Langchain. Back before I joined Apple his ML course
was the one I did to learn ML/AI, and I highly recommend his courses. These
are great and very needed right now.
MORE |
BUILD CHAT APPS
|
BUILD LANGCHAIN APPS

Google AI Courses
Google also launched 9 new courses that are free for everyone. Topics
include GenAI, LLMs, Attention, and other topics.
MORE

New AI Paper: Bytes Are All You Need
Researchers developed ByteFormer, a model that performs
classification directly on file bytes without decoding, achieving 77.33%
ImageNet Top-1 accuracy on TIFF files and 95.42% on WAV files. ByteFormer
also has privacy-preserving applications.
MORE

Meta’s Office Return
Meta Platforms announced employees must return to the office three
days a week starting in September, marking the company’s strictest policy
change since embracing remote work during the pandemic.
MORE

Sponsor

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HUMAN NEWS

Parallel Profits
Conservative Americans are building a parallel economy to cater to
their values and preferences.

– The article discusses the rise of conservative companies targeting
God-fearing, gun-toting patriots.
– Examples include Tusk and Rumble as
alternatives to Google and YouTube, and Patriot Mobile as a Christian
conservative wireless network.
– PublicSq, an online marketplace, hosts
40,000 firms devoted to freedom, family, and the Constitution.
–
However, building viable alternatives to common products and pulling patrons
from big firms is challenging
– Some conservative companies focus on
strengthening conservative hotbeds, like Conservative Move and RedBalloon.
MORE

Indian Curriculum Chaos
India is removing periodic table and evolution content from school
textbooks, leaving experts baffled and concerned.

– Periodic
table, evolution, and other foundational topics cut from curriculum for
under-16s
– Changes affect 134 million students aged 11-18 in India’s
schools
– Over 4,500 scientists, teachers, and science communicators
signed an appeal to reinstate axed content
– Critics argue removal of
fundamental concepts stifles curiosity and hinders understanding
– Some
suggest changes driven by religious groups and political influences
MORE

Venus Unmasked
Venus is shining bright in the sky, and here’s why it’s the perfect
time to take a look at her.

– Venus is currently at its
brightest, making it easy to spot in the night sky
– Its brightness is
due to its proximity to the sun and its dense carbon dioxide atmosphere
reflecting light
– Venus undergoes phases like our moon, which Galileo
used as evidence for the heliocentric solar system model
– Some
upcoming celestial events include Mars passing through the Beehive star
cluster and a tight triangle formation with Venus, Mars, and the crescent
moon  MORE

Cable TV Decline
Cable now has the fewest subscribers since 1992. YouTube TV is the
only winner right now.
MORE

IDEAS & ANALYSIS

Purple is the Way
My buddy Jason had a great
post about Purple Teaming
this weekend and I liked what I came up with for a yes/and reply.

• Red > Blue > Purple < Blue < Red.

Or, put another way,

• Challenge > Growth > You Get Stronger < Growth < Challenge

Red = Challenge
Purple = Growth
You Get Stronger = Outcome

So
basically you can’t grow without challenge, and that’s what Red is there
for. But the purpose is the improvement of self, which is what Blue is there
for. MORE

NOTES

Big Platform News!
I am about to make the biggest change to my
tech stack I’ve made in over a decade, if not ever. I’m going to be
consolidating my platforms into a single solution. This will unify the
newsletter and the website so the team can put out content much more
efficiently. I anticipate bumps in the road!

• I’m worried about email delivery being wonky

• I’m worried about the process of migrating subscriptions from Memberful
  to the new platform. They both use Stripe on the backend so that’s good,
  but I hope there isn’t a bunch of double-charge / confusion drama from
  the transition. If there is, I’ll make it right. Just be patient with me
  during the move please!

• Unknown gotchas. With a move this big there are bound to be surprises,
  and I’m mostly ok with that. It’s only the top two above that I’m really
  working to avoid

• One downside is that the URL structure for the site will be different
  because the new place doesn’t support custom URL paths yet. So I’ll lose
  a lot of SEO, but I don’t mind so much because AI is going to eat SEO
  anyway.

Anyway, the TLDR is that things are about to be super smooth and efficient
going forward, which will result in more and better content, but
things might get rocky for a few weeks during the switch. Please bear with
us!

Trump = Ukraine Loses
I don’t think nearly as
much about politics as I used to. For me the world is security and AI right
now. But one thought I had recently was that Ukraine will be in horrible
shape if Trump gets re-elected. They’d basically lose the war overnight. He
went on CNN and gave a perfect, pro-Russia position on Ukraine, refusing to
blame Russia for the invasion and saying he’d end the conflict in 24 hours.
There’s still a lot of time between now and the winner having control in
2025, but this is the one issue I’m tracking closely. Just imagine how much
effort Russia is about to spend on getting him re-elected. It’s their only
chance for them to win the war.

Superhuman Referral
If you’ve thought about trying out Superhuman before and are
interested in getting a free month, you can sign up with
my link
and get one! I’ve been using Superhuman for years now and it’s absolutely my
favorite email client ever. It’s very Vim/Shortcuts and Keyboard friendly
and very conscious of how high-performers get work done. Cannot recommend
enough.
MORE

Four Happy Homies at EDC
This is
my favorite picture
from EDC this year. Remember what I said last week about regularly scheduled
homie-time. It’s essential.
MORE

DISCOVERY

llm-exe — A buddy of mine created his own Langchain alternative built on
Typescript. He was unhappy with how Langchain abstracts things so much so he
built a system that’s more transparent and usable. I’m messing with it now
and giving him feedback, and he’d love to get your feedback as well!
MORE

State of GPT — The absolute, hands-down, best 42 minutes you’ll
ever spend on learning how to make killer GPT prompts. This is a full
presentation by one of the masters, Andrej Karpathy. If you’re messing with
AI this is a MUST.
MORE

A photographer’s perfect shot of a pyramid, the moon, and an
airplane.
MORE

Someone combined the Photoshop AI beta with Blender and
Midjourney to create a full AI-generated game environment.
MORE

An unbelievable thread about a photographer taking a shot of
the international space station against the moon. He got attacked by flat
earthers who claimed the shot was faked, and the resulting thread is
fantastic.
MORE

Unpacking Shellcode with Ghidra Emulator
MORE

Chain of Thought Hub — A rating system for LLM reasoning
performance.
MORE

Peelian Principles
MORE

Stop disqualifying great candidates with bad questions.
MORE

RECOMMENDATION OF THE WEEK

Watch the whole State of GPT talk
by Andrej Karpathy. If you’re into AI it’ll be the best time you’ve spent on
a video, and if you’re not into AI maybe it’ll help you get started.
MORE

 
APHORISM OF THE WEEK

“The language of friendship is not words but meanings. It is an intelligence
above language.”

Henry David Thoreau

💙 Thank you for supporting this work. I’m glad you find it worth your
patronage.

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