I’ve only just now—within the last five years—realized how powerful reading is. I think I went through the following evolution. Thinking it was an intellectual nice-to-have (my whole life). Thinking it was a genuine enhancement to one’s cognitive abilities (up to 10 years ago). Realizing it’s the hidden secret of most creative people in the world (5 years…
AR Glasses + Language Translation / Subtitles
There are credible rumors that Apple is working on AR glasses. Of course that’s not to say that they’ll decide they’re good enough to launch. If and when they do appear, though, I think one of the first attention-grabbing features will be realtime language translation. So, the combination of quality direction microphones, voice recognition, and natural language processing….
Moving to a Sponsorship Model
I’ve been quite reluctant to run ads on this website, for a number of reasons. They feel dirty to me, whatever that means. They literally junk up the aesthetics of the site, although the single ad in the sidebar wasn’t bad. I just prefer to be someone who doesn’t participate in the ad modal. For those reasons, I’m…
Some Thoughts on Dataism
The final chapters of Homo Deus talks about the concept of Dataism. A cursory glance online doesn’t give too many previous reverences to the term, so I’m not sure if Yuval Noah Harari created the term himself, if he’s giving a different definition for a term already in use, or exactly what that situation is. But let’s use…
VPN Recommendations
VPNs are becoming a major topic of conversation due to the recent removal of ISP privacy protections. There are hundreds of VPN providers out there already, and more are materializing every day—some for good reasons, and some for bad. Given that reality, I thought it would be a good idea to assemble a short, curated list of my…
The Unsupervised Learning Book List
I’ve been reading more than ever over the last five years, and I get a lot of questions about what I recommend. So here’s my official book list. I’ll give one sentence about what each is about, but I won’t try to sell it to you. The sell is simply that I’ve read a couple hundred books over…
Pythagoras’s Theory on How Parents Make Children
I’m currently reading The Gene: An Intimate History, a stellar book on the history of genetics. One of the anecdotes in the book, which I really enjoyed, was that Pythagoras—who we know best from the Pythagorean Theorem—also had a theory about birth and heredity. As you’ll recall, the Pythagorean Theorem states that: a2 + b2 = c2 …and…
Unsupervised Learning: No. 72
This week’s topics: Apple fixed tons of bugs, hacking smart TVs over DVB-T, gift card bots, handgun AIs, Uber manipulations, AI vs. jobs, how to read more, cloud secret management, OPSEC and phishing, links, projects, and more… This is Episode No. 72 of Unsupervised Learning—a weekly show where I curate 3-5 hours of reading in infosec, technology, and…
AI and Synthetic Mind Creation
Before we can fully transfer and represent human minds into digital form, and thus achieve long-term immortality, we will have many intermediate phases. One such phase will be parsing the artifacts left behind by a living person before they died, and then creating a digital simulation that emulates them as closely as possible. If the simulations are good…
OPSEC vs. Unsubscribe Phishing Attacks
Woke up in attack mode today. Consider the common tone of many social media posts complaining about various brands. I’ve met elementary school kids with more tech knowledge than the average Best Buy store manager. or… Anyone know a better bank than Bank of America? I’ve had enough of their mistreatment of customers. In both of these cases,…
The Bottom Turtle of Cloud Secret Management
One of the best talks I saw at Enigma 2017 was this one by Ian Haken (@ianhaken) of Netflix about establishing a trust scaffolding within the cloud. When building complex IT infrastructure you always have to create/retrieve/and store secrets, and when you’re doing this quickly, at scale, like we do in modern cloud environments, you have to start…
No, the IRA Isn’t Just Like ISIS
On March 22nd, 2017 a man drove his car into pedestrians on the Westminster Bridge in London, and then attacked a police officer inside New Palace Yard. He killed three people and injured more than 50. The perpetrator had converted to Islam during one of his periods in jail, and the attack had much of the classic structure…
Unsupervised Learning: No. 71
This week’s topics: Half of Android devices haven’t been patched in over a year, Tavisclosure, NEST camera flaws, senate vs. privacy, electronics ban, bad Let’s Encrypt certs, Moodle SQLi, infosec venture capital drying up, IBM employees heading into the office, Twitter going paid model, Google killing Talk, Quiet spaces, Age of the influencer, AI vs. jobs, tools, aphorisms,…
The Rise of the Individual Influencer
I think we’re entering a new era of human creativity and productivity—one that is focused around individual influencers and the value that they bring to the world by themselves. This transition is being driven by several factors: Companies shedding their workforces due to advancements in AI, automation, and robotics, leaving people to come up with alternative ways to…
On Islam it’s Extreme vs. Extreme
Canada is trying to make it illegal to criticize Islam by labeling all such criticisms as “Islamaphobia”. That’s dumb. The hard right in the U.S. and Europe wants to do the exact opposite and label all Muslims as terrorists. That’s dumb too. So now the forgotten center of these two countries get to watch the fringe extremes battle…
Game Design is About to Become a Critical Career
Game Design—defined not just as the visual elements in a game, but the underlying structure, incentives, value systems, and other mechanics—is about to become an extremely important job in our society. In the past the title was associated with the visual aspects of video games, such as the art, the interfaces, etc., and video games have long been…
Unsupervised Learning: No. 70
This week’s topics: Russians at it again, Microsoft and Adobe updates, PoS breaches, US-CERT throws TLS shade, epilepsy tweet stalking, Tesla’s billion, lip-reading AI, autonomous BMWs, Fiber Lasers, taxing robots, Green Zones and Red Zones, AI disruption of healthcare, discovery, recommendations, and aphorisms, and more… This is Episode No. 70 of Unsupervised Learning—a weekly show where I curate…
Failure and How to Help People Avoid It
One fundamental difference between the left and right is their approach to handling failure. I was raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, and what I’ve been taught my whole life is that people fail for reasons that are not their own fault, and so we need to help them. That’s liberal canon. Later in life I learned…
Green Zone, Red Zone
This post will be stream of consciousness style. I’m worried that existing trends around income inequality are only going to accelerate, and that this time around it’s going to become quite acute, with tangible consequences. The author of Capital in the 21st Century made the fascinating observation that income inequality has mostly always been high, and that the…
It’s Not About Trump Winning
The left and center of this country used to think that the biggest calamity to befall the country was half of the population thinking Trump would be a good president. That’s no longer news, because it’s been bumped off the top spot by something even more depressing: close to half the country actually thinks he’s doing a good…
What Evolution Can Teach Us About Climate Change
Lots of regular, educated people are incensed about the fact that Republicans reject man-made climate change. The biggest frustration is that their opinions seem immune to evidence, and yet the solution seems to be presenting even more. It doesn’t work. But there’s a precedent here that tells us everything we need to know: Republicans don’t even believe in…
Rural America Conflated Two Separate Issues
I was talking to my friend Mark the other day about the election and stumbled upon a realization. There are two primary forces that pushed most of rural, white America to vote for Trump. The disappearance of blue-collar jobs. Overzealous political correctness. The loss of American Jobs The jobs have gone away and aren’t coming back. This has…
Unsupervised Learning: No. 69
This week’s topics: The Vault7 CIA dump, Russian shenanigans, Dahua, Verifone, mandatory genetic testing, WordPress, atomic storage, Google Kaggles, presenting at HouSecCon, fasting research, data wars, chaos, voice interfaces, tools, projects, and more… This is Episode No. 69 of Unsupervised Learning—a weekly show where I curate 3-5 hours of reading in infosec, technology, and humans into a 15…
The Bifurcation of America: The Forced Class Separation into Alphas and Betas
There is something monumental happening in the United States that very few people are aware of. It’s been written and talked about for decades, but the conversation is always so academic that it never reaches those who need to hear it. Our country is in the process of being ripped into two distinct classes—The Alpha Class and the…
A Response to Benedict Evans on the Limitations of Voice Interfaces
Benedict Evans wrote a great piece about voice interfaces where he argues his position that voice interface isn’t quite the future of computer interface that we think it is. He mentions a few constraints. Given that you cannot answer any question, there is a second scaling problem – does the user know what they can ask? I suspect…
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