Unsupervised Learning NO. 388

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.

Hey there,

We had a brilliant book club yesterday and picked our new book. I got
my new M2 Mac Studio beast of a computer set up in just one day, which
is a record. Been working out more lately and the body feels happy-sore.
Huberman was right about consistent creatine; it’s fairly magical. And
I’m finishing up a security assessment while continuing to transition
members to Beehiiv.

Overall, life is stellar, and I hope it’s the same for you. Let’s get
into the week!

In this episode:

📚 Using Reflections to Compress LLM Context Data
🎧 My Appearance on
the Critical Thinking Podcast
🍏 Apple’s Critical Security Updates
⌚
Suspicious Smartwatches Targeting Military Personnel
🔥 Databricks
Acquires Generative AI Company
🌐 Cloudflare’s Observatory Performance
Monitoring Tool
📺 LG Integrates AirPlay 2 and HomeKit into Hotel
TVs
💼 Remote Work as a Competitive Advantage for Small Tech
Companies
🐝 Beehiiv Raises $12.5 Million
🔍 AI Zoom Magic by
Midjourney
🇨🇳 China’s Economic Countdown?
🧠 Illusion of Moral
Decline
📸 Smartphone Domination in Photography
💡 The Worst
Intellectual Trait: NFC
🌍 Climate Change vs. Familial
Self-preservation Instincts
🚢 Titanic Belief and Ignoring Danger

MY WORK

Using Reflections to Compress LLM Context Data
My new essay on one way to turn gigabytes of data into a few
Kilobytes of LLM context.
MORE

My Appearance on the Critical Thinking Podcast
I appeared with uber-hacker and fellow UL’er Joseph
Thacker (@rez0) on the spectacular
Critical Thinking podcast. We talked about AI and hacking, both from the perspective of hacking
using AI and hacking AI itself. Really enjoyed it!
MORE

SECURITY NEWS

💀Apple Updates
Apple has pushed critical security updates to fix vulnerabilities
exploited by ‘Operation Triangulation’ and the TriangleDB attack, affecting
devices as far back as 2013.

– The updates cover iOS, iPadOS, macOS, Safari, and watchOS, fixing a kernel
vulnerability that allowed arbitrary code execution
– The flaw was
exploited in versions of iOS earlier than 15.7, but can be found in all
Apple devices
– A WebKit flaw was also addressed, which may have been
actively exploited
– Update immediately if you haven’t yet
MORE

Smartwatch Military Attack
Military personnel are receiving suspicious smartwatches in the mail,
possibly rigged with malware to access user data, banking info, and
conversations.

– The U.S. Army’s Criminal Investigation Division issued a warning about
these unsolicited devices
– It’s unclear if the attack specifically
targets military personnel or if it’s part of illegal brushing scams
–
Service members are advised to keep the devices turned off and report the
incident to authorities
– In 2018, the Pentagon restricted the use of
fitness-trackers and location-revealing mobile apps due to privacy and
security concerns.
MORE
|
THE ARMY REPORT

Vulnerabilities:

• Juniper Networks Junos OS and Junos OS Evolved. DoS.
  MORE

• BIND. DoS. 7.5. MORE

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TECHNOLOGY NEWS

Databricks Gets Into AI
As predicted here at UL, Databricks just bought a generative AI
company for over a billion dollars to connect businesses’ data to LLMs.
Expect everyone in the data space to do this. Splunk. SIEM vendors. Etc. The
main game now for data companies is figuring out how to solve
the LLM context size problem
discussed in this week’s essay.
MORE
|
CONTEXT DATA ESSAY

Cloudflare’s Observatory
Cloudflare introduced Observatory, a comprehensive performance
monitoring tool that integrates real-time user monitoring data, offering
valuable insights into website performance and user experience across
various environments and network conditions. It replaces the previous Speed
tool and provides a single dashboard to capture customer experiences and
performance enhancement recommendations.
MORE

Vacation Screen Time
LG is collaborating with hotels to integrate AirPlay 2 and HomeKit
into hotel room TVs, providing a seamless streaming experience for guests
who want to enjoy their favorite content while traveling. This is the tech
future I’ve always imagined; your content comes with you. Can’t wait.
MORE

Remote Work Becoming a Startup-only Thing?
Smaller tech companies are leveraging remote work policies to compete
with big tech firms, offering employees flexibility and work-life balance as
an alternative to higher salaries.

– 81% of smaller tech companies allow remote work
– Remote work
attracts more diverse talent
– Big tech firms are returning to
office-based work
MORE

Beehiiv Raises $12.5 Million
Beehiiv, a newsletter platform competing with Substack and Mailchimp
(and that we’re also using here at Unsupervised Learning), announced raising
$12.5 million in a Series A funding round. The funds will be used to expand
its product, bring on more writers, and build out its revenues.
MORE

AI Zoom Magic
Midjourney unveils v5.2 of its AI-powered image synthesis model,
featuring a “zoom out” function that maintains the central image while
building a larger scene around it, simulating a camera-like zoom. Seriously
impressive.
MORE
|
EXAMPLES

HUMAN NEWS

China’s Economic Countdown?
Business Insider is reporting that Wall Street is increasingly
concerned about China’s mounting debt, which could cause an economic
implosion by 2023 and have far-reaching effects on global markets.

– China’s debt-to-GDP ratio has reached a staggering 317%, raising alarm
bells for investors.
– The country’s real estate sector, which accounts
for a significant portion of the debt, is particularly vulnerable to a
downturn.
– Experts warn that a Chinese economic collapse could trigger
a global financial crisis, similar to the 2008 meltdown.

What I don’t get about these types of articles is how varied they are. It
seems like it depends far too much on the opinionated analysis of the
expert. Like in one article China is about to overtake us and leave us in
the dust, and in the next they’re about to implode. Which is it? I know the
answer is probably both at the same time, but I wish it were easier to
extract truth from economic experts.
MORE

Illusion of Decline?
Psychologist Adam Mastroianni argues that the perception of moral
decline is a cognitive illusion, influenced by biased exposure to negative
information and biased memory. I can buy this to an extent, but I think many
of these arguments (including Pinker’s) are flawed because it all comes down
to which questions you’re asking.
MORE

Nearly All Pictures From Smartphones
A study by Max Spielmann discovered that 92.5% of all photos are now
taken with smartphones, largely influenced by Instagram’s role in
photo-sharing. Meanwhile, disposable camera sales have doubled since 2015,
and interest in DSLRs has declined.
MORE

IDEAS & ANALYSIS

The Worst Intellectual Trait? NFC.
I caught up with my friend
Lisa Young
recently who I’d not seen in probably 15 years. She’s a total cyber badass,
and she taught me tons about risk management (and security assessment
in general) when I worked with her back in Tallahassee. Anyway, we were
talking about some smart people we know, industry pioneers, etc., and a few
people came up that think their poo doesn’t stink. We were talking about
ego, and confidence, and all of that, when I finally captured why I didn’t
like this one particular Risk Representative and their associated Religion.
Curiosity. Or, more specifically, the lack thereof. We both realized
we don’t dislike people who believe in their system (lots of people are like
that, including us). The problem is people who have closed their minds to
alternatives! Days later I decided to assign a damning acronym. Not Fucking
Curious. NFC. Someone: “Hey, sounds like you don’t like that guy’s theories?
What’s the deal?” Me: “The theories are fine, the problem is the guy has a
bad case of NFC.” Them: “NFC?” Me: “Yeah. They’re not fucking curious.”

Climate Change vs. Familial Self-preservation Instincts
I recently watched
a brilliant speech
by someone who looks to be an anti-woke conservative on the topic of Climate
Change. I’m rather in the center about the topic, meaning I think the
climate is warming, due in significant part to human influence, and that
something must be done about it. Where I break from the extreme left is in
thinking that we are going to somehow stop the emissions before bad things
happen. I think the solution needs to be technological, e.g., carbon
capture, and that’s where this talk comes in. This guy captures a version of
that argument that’s extremely compelling. Regardless of where you
are on the topic, I strongly recommend checking out the argument.
MORE

Titanic Belief
One of the best pieces of analysis I saw on the
Titan submarine thing was from James Cameron, who is an expert on everything
Titanic himself. He said the thing that struck him was how both the captain
of the Titan sub and the captain of the Titanic itself both were told about
imminent danger, and they both ignored it.
MORE

NOTES

The transition to Beehiiv continues. The team will be sending an email out
to existing members to nudge them to transition to Beehiiv. Many of you
already have, but there are a lot more to go, so the email should help
there. The process is simple: 1)
sign up with your new Beehiiv account, 2) cancel your old account. 3) Let us know in the Discord how much time
to add for your existing time remaining. You won’t lose any time from the
transition!

I’m on my new primary computer after the fastest new system install ever.
Just one Saturday! I got a nearly maxed out Apple Studio Ultra, with 176GB
of memory. Only thing I didn’t max out was the SSD. This thing is
snappy. And even better, I’m back to being able to use all three
monitors (1 x Apple XDR, 2 x LG 5Ks). Why so much power? I intend to be
doing a lot of local AI model stuff on this system in addition to my
dedicated AI box. I think a lot of forthcoming models are going to be tuned
to run well on the bigger Apple systems with the Mx architectures.
THE WIRED REVIEW

We ditched the image-heavy version of the newsletter. Too noisy, and it goes
against the UL brand. Back to clean simplicity! I might throw one or two
images in later, but it’ll stay mostly text.

I just joined a quality think tank that I can’t wait to do more with. I
really like the leadership and energy for the group, and I think we have a
good chance of producing some valuable outputs.

No episode next week due to Fourth of July! See you in two weeks. But
remember, we’re active in UL Chat all day every day!
BECOME A MEMBER

DISCOVERY

⚙️ Multi-Action Agents — Langchain now has Multi-action Agents using OpenAI
functions. The “openai-multi-functions” agent enables Large Language Models
to choose and utilize multiple tools in parallel, significantly boosting
efficiency in various tasks.
MORE

Destroyed by Breach — My buddy
Adrian Sanabria
maintains a list of companies that actually went under as a result of a
cyber event.
MORE

People who worked in the early naughts describe their lives to blown-away
young people today.
MORE

You don’t need a vision.
Note: I don’t agree with this completely, but I get what he’s trying to
say and it’s worth reading. MORE

The Ferengi Rules of Acquisition
MORE

Every Black Mirror Episode, from Worst to Best
MORE

RECOMMENDATION OF THE WEEK

Mark Manson has a newsletter that’s similar to James Clear’s, but that I
think is even better. Like every single one has given me at least something
to think about, and the good ones are remarkably strong. Highly recommended.
THE BREAKTHROUGH

 
APHORISM OF THE WEEK

❝  

You don’t understand something until you can tell a story about it.