Unsupervised Learning Newsletter NO. 331

STANDARD EDITION | EP. 331 | MAY 16 2022
 

Hey all! Sorry for the slightly late and slightly abridged episode…

Been super sick.


SECURITY NEWS

CISA says you shouldn't install May Windows updates on domain controllers. The updates evidently cause authentication issues. More

Apple has issued an emergency update to patch a zero-day that's hacking Macs and Watches. More

Uber's security team is now going to pay bounties within 14 days of receiving the report, and they will consistently pay out using CVSS 3.1 ratings. More

There are some military attack and defense ratios that function as rules of thumb and have held up over time. They include Attacking a Fortified/Prepared Defender Requires 3:1, Counterattacking a Flank Requires 1:1, and Delaying an Enemy: 1:6. More

Vulnerabilities:

• May's patch Tuesday fixed 6 critical CVEs and an actively exploited Windows vulnerability. More

• QNAP patches critical issue in network surveillance products. More

• SonicWall releases patches for flaws affecting multiple devices. More

• There's a critical vulnerability in Zyxel firewalls that can lead to arbitrary code execution. More

Companies:

• Email security company Abnormal hits unicorn status after $210 million raise. More

TECHNOLOGY NEWS

Gato is a new system by DeepMind that can perform over 600 "generalized" tasks. On 450 of the 604 tasks DeepMind said it performs better than a human expert more than half the time. Reminds me of Anchorman: "60% of the time…it works every time." This is a step along the path to AGI, but nobody knows how big a step. More | How Transformers Work

Netflix has told employees that if they don't like the company's content, they can quit. Interesting timing given their stock just crashed and they might have been looking at layoffs anyway. More

One analysis says ~20% of Twitter accounts are garbage. More

DJI has a new drone that's likely to hit the sweet spot for many. It's called the Mini 3 Pro and it's: under 250 grams so you don't have to register it with the FAA, it can do 4K at 60FPS, it has obstacle avoidance, it can shoot vertical video and has subject tracking, and it can record in D-Cinelike mode. Battery life is 34 minutes on the standard battery. More

Google held their I/O conference, but it was hard to see why anyone should care. They had more AI stuff which was pretty cool, more phone updates, they teased an AR headset. Can't remember the rest, and I'm not alone. I'm baised towards Apple stuff, to be sure, but I think Google really does struggle to make people take notice of their announcements. More

Cloudflare now has a Pub/Sub service (beta) built on MQTT. More

AT&T has enabled location-based routing for 911 calls, meaning emergency services will be able to accurately find you when you call from a mobile phone. More

Disney+ beat expectations at 138 million subscribers as Netflix stumbles. More

Companies:

• Chainanalysis raises $170 million at an $8.6 billion valuation to track cryptocurrency transactions. More

• Sunday Security announced $4 million in seed funding to protect senior executives and key personnel from hacking. More

HUMAN NEWS

Welp, crypto got wrecked. Along with most of the stock market, really. Especially tech stocks. One indication to me that crypto is more fragile than we think is that all the various coins basically move as one. Bitcoin goes up or down, and most of the other offerings follow. They also tend to mirror tech stock performance, which means it doesn't really seem like the hedge it was made out to be. Interesting times. More

Mcdonald's is getting out of Russia. More


CONTENT, IDEAS & ANALYSIS

A Lot of Tech People Are Rebelling Against Returning to the Office — This seems to be combining with the Great Resignation narrative and turning into an overall trend of "I don't want to work like I used to work." It's hard to know how big it is because the data are spotty, but I ADP did a survey that found two-thirds of respondents said they'd look for a new job if they had to go back to the office full-time. I think it's a combination of multiple things. I think people are deadened inside after Covid. I think they're wanting a better balance of life vs. work. I think people are tired of silly commutes and silly meetings. And I think they feel empowered to go work somewhere else if they can't get what they want. Then on top of that, you have companies like Apple and Microsoft demanding people return to work right as Covid is rising again. People just seem to be over it. More

Musk is Underestimating the Difficulty of Content Moderation — I think he's making the same mistake with content moderation that he did with autonomous driving. In short, he’s using the “How hard could it be?” approach—which is fine if the result is not shipping a feature, but really bad when unleashing 8Chan on the public. We've been struggling with content moderation for decades. We've spent billions on it. And we still do a pretty bad job at it. This really reminds me of autonomous driving where Elon walked in and said he'd have it solved within a year or two. Completely autonomous Teslas. And now he acknowledges he was wrong about that, and that this is a very hard computer vision and AI problem. I hope he learns the content moderation lesson sooner rather than later, even if he doesn't end up buying Twitter.

NOTES

I'm currently reading a biography on Marx and just learned that he was a Jewish anti-Semite (Jewish parents but fiercely anti-capitalist).

Just added Don't Trust Your Gut to my reading list. Really enjoyed his previous book, Everybody Lies. More

 

DISCOVERY

Why Gamers Hate NFTs More

Just Stop Apologizing More

How I Trained my TikTok More

Orville has a new season coming. A true gem of both sci-fi and comedy. More

No, America is Not Collapsing More

The First Image of Earth Taken from Space More

Westworld is coming back on June 26th. More

A Secret Service Report on Incel Terrorism More

"I started establishing 'anti-goals' for all new projects." More

People Are Dating All Wrong According to Data Science More

[ SCANNING ] You can export Nuclei findings as Markdown. More


RECOMMENDATION

A bit of investment advice from a non-expert. Remember that the best investors often aren't the smartest or those with the most information. They're usually the ones with the best temperament. If you're in stocks that you think are good bets long-term, and you aren't trying to get rich quick, crashes like this can be an opportunity. Try to get to a place where you have a few things that you're happy holding long-term, and prepare yourself mentally for ups and downs. Make a plan beforehand for when you will sell, or when you will buy more, and rely on those previous decisions when emotions are high. I'm personally not stressed at all right now because I like the stuff I'm in, and I'm happy riding along. Doesn't mean I'm right. I still could have chosen poorly. But at least I'm not refreshing my stock page every few minutes.


APHORISM

"If you're in the dirt, maybe you're not buried. Maybe you're planted."

— Unknown