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UL NO. 437: My List of Hard-won Life Lessons

New AUGMENTED Course Date, 3 New Essays, Disgruntled deletions, Scale and Merit, Russia moves to Yuan, and more…

New AUGMENTED Course Date, 3 New Essays, Disgruntled deletions, Scale and Merit, Russia moves to Yuan, and more… ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌

UL NO. 437: My List of Hard-won Life Lessons

New AUGMENTED Course Date, 3 New Essays, Disgruntled deletions, Scale and Merit, Russia moves to Yuan, and more…

👉 Continue reading online to avoid the email cutoff issue 👈

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SECURITY | AI | MEANING :: Unsupervised Learning is my continuous stream of original ideas, analysis, tooling, and mental models designed to help humans thrive in a world full of AI.

TOC

  • NOTES
  • MY WORK
  • STORIES
  • IDEAS
  • DISCOVERY
  • RECOMMENDATION OF THE WEEK
  • APHORISM OF THE WEEK

NOTES

I’ll be delivering my AUGMENTED course live again on July 26th!

The theme of the course this time—and going forward—will be Moving Towards Human 3.0—How to Survive and Thrive in World Full of AI. The course content will include:

HUMAN 3.0

  • What I think is coming for us
  • What I’m planning for and learning to get ready
  • Human 3.0, why I think it’s necessary, and how to move towards it

SKILLSETS & MENTAL FRAMES

  • Mandatory skillsets and mental frames to stand out after AI
  • What to read, study, and learn to make money post-AI
  • What advice to give to young people you care about

INTEGRATING AI INTO YOUR LIFE & WORK

  • My personal AI stack, and how I use it every day
  • How to build a life workflow diagram
  • How to use Fabric to integrate AI into your life workflow
  • How to create custom Fabric patterns for anything
  • Live Pattern-building for multiple attendee use-cases

RESOURCES

  • A list of my recommended books
  • Recommended podcast episodes
  • Recommended list of people to follow
  • Favorite AI projects and tools
  • Other recommended training / courses / resources
  • And much more…

Reserve a Limited Slot for AUGMENTED JULY 2024

  • My friend Monica is launching her Cybersecurity Leadership Masterclass soon! She’s covering a ton of stuff, including:

    • How to get into a leadership position
    • How to build a security strategy, how to handle budget, politics, and communication as a security leader, and like a dozen other topics.

    I’ve been watching the class develop and I can’t wait to see it launch. I highly recommend aspiring security leaders—or leaders who want to up their game—attend. SIGN UP FOR THE CLASS

  • Trying to make sense of AI’s role in your security operations? You’re not alone. Join me and James Spiteri, Director of Product Management for Elastic Security, for a discussion on the benefits, risks, and considerations when implementing AI technology into your security stack. Tuesday, June 25th, 9 AM PDT REGISTER FOR THE WEBINAR

  • I’m doing a minor modification of header titles, going from SECURITY/TECH/HUMANS to NEWS/IDEAS/DISCOVERY. The rationale is that: For me, security, tech, and humans are merging so deeply that I see them as integrated. So I think it makes more sense to break things down by new things happening, ideas that I find fascinating, and surfacing cool apps/projects/etc. If we don’t like it, I can always go back to the previous way, but I think this is more natural.

Ok, let’s get to it…

MY WORK

A couple of new essays this week.

First, my new piece on how AI will soon start teaching us, testing us—and scariest of all—rating us. And how these scores will start being used everywhere…

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ASTRA Scores: AI-Powered Assessment and Rating Systems

With AI, hiring, dating, and learning is about to get very strange.

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The Fast-Slow Problem

We've become so obsessed with fast pleasures that we can't enjoy slow ones anymore.

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A List of My Hard-won Life Lessons

A list of things it took me a very long time to learn.

I would like to move more to a model where I support my work with memberships, courses, and revenue from the apps that I build—rather than sponsorships.

To help me realize this, I’d like to invite you to become a UL member.

Here’s what you get:

  • Entry into the best online community I’ve ever been a part of
  • We’re voraciously curious, constantly reading, constantly learning, and we share what we learn with others. But most importantly, we’re kind. We’re a community of helping people become their best selves.
  • An insanely great Book Club, which has been running for like 5 years straight!
  • Additional monthly meetups where we share tools, routines, personal challenges, and lots of other stuff you can’t get anywhere else
  • Significant discounts on my paid offerings
  • Access to private UL events
  • And more…

Honestly there are lots of benefits to being a member that make it worth more than the price, but at basically $8/month the community is worth it just by itself.

Become a Member

🫶🏻Thank you. I truly appreciate your support of the work that I do.

-Daniel

STORIES

The House just passed a bill that bans DJI drones from using FCC frequencies, and it's now moving to the Senate. This could mean no more DJI drones in the U.S. if it becomes law. Would be a trip to see this happen before TikTok. | DRONEDJ

A disgruntled ex-employee cost NCS over $600,000 by deleting all 180 of its test servers using scripts he found on Google. Deprovisioning gets so many people. I honestly think IAM will take longer to solve than AGI. That and A/V. | TOMSHARDWARE

💡I mean, there are lots of things that have to go wrong for this to happen, but we’d be lying if we said it wasn’t possible in a lot of places we’ve worked. Or still work.

Wells Fargo fired over a dozen employees for faking keyboard activity to look busy. | by Hannah Levitt | BLOOMBERG

💡So happy to see this. Physical keys are great, but I’d prefer both security and convenience. Passkeys have to be the best thing that’s happened to consumer security in 10 years.

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AWS has added FIDO2 passkeys for MFA, making accounts more secure and user-friendly. Root users must enable MFA by July 2024.

New York Times source code was stolen using an exposed GitHub token. | BLEEPINGCOMPUTER

iOS 18 will let you automatically record and transcribe your phone calls through the Phone app. | by Juli Clover | MACRUMORS

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Canada's proposed Online Harms Act could imprison people for life over hate speech and even preemptively restrict their freedom based on anticipated crimes. | by Conor Friedersdorf | THE ATLANTIC

LinkedIn is rolling out AI career coaches that can help with everything from negotiating salaries to writing résumés. | by Amanda Hoover | WIRED

💡See my essay above on rating systems. ASTRA SCORES ESSAY

AI and LLMs are transforming cyber insurance by making real-time risk assessments, underwriting, and claims processing more efficient. | by Louis Columbus | VENTUREBEAT

💡Oh man, I haven’t done a piece on this yet, but AI is going to make all insurance companies a lot smarter about real-time risk assessments and pricing adjustments.

Scale came out with a “controversial” stance that they will hire on merit and merit alone. It’s basically an anti-DEI statement, but not in a bad way. They’re saying that it will actually lead to healthier diversity than when it’s forced by woke policies. | by Scale AI | SCALE

💡Everyone anticipated massive backlash to this statement, but there’s been very little. Which basically means the political pendulum has swung—or is still swinging—away from extreme wokeness. I just hope the pendulum stops in the middle rather than going into crazy town on the other side of this clock metaphor.

Nathan Wade's media consultant interrupted his CNN interview when he was asked about his relationship timeline with Fulton County DA Fani Willis. Wade said the relationship is a distraction and not relevant to the case. | by Lauren Sforza | THE HILL Consultant Interrupts Interview Over Relationship Timeline

Tesla shareholders have backed Elon Musk's $56 billion pay package and approved moving the firm's legal HQ to Texas. The deal was previously blocked by a Delaware judge for being unfair to shareholders. | by João da Silva and Natalie Sherman | BBC Tesla Shareholders Approve Musk's $56B Pay Package

💡This feels very Atlas Shrugged to me. Basically, give the actual builders anything they want. There are few of them left and they’re special. I like the pro-builder sentiment there, but I fear it comes with an unhealthy worship culture that breeds toxicity.

Like, “Give Buck Rhinehold a harem! Buck deserves it!” (cheering)

I’d like to see a healthy hybrid of Atlassian respect for founders/builders/creators, etc., but with the assumption that everyone should be like that, and thus, there’s no room for god-complexes.

Wow, what timing.

Elon Musk had sexual relationships with multiple SpaceX employees, including a former intern he later hired onto his executive team, according to The Wall Street Journal. Another woman alleged that Musk asked her to have his children and then denied her a raise when she refused. | by Elizabeth Lopatto | THE VERGE

💡This is so insane. I mean, I’m inspired by his willingness to just ask for what he wants. There’s a version of that where it’s healthy. But, um, not with your fucking employees.

“Julie, great work on the Montague project. I admire you; you should have my babies.” (not a real quote, obviously)

Like it’d be wrong even if nothing bad happened from it, because of the potential for it go wrong. But if he’s actually doing what they’re saying here, that’d be really bad. It’s not just making the proposition, but punishing those who refuse.

This is why it’s not allowed, people!

California has the biggest wage gap in the US. Seems to me like just the most extreme version of a big city. You’re going to have the higher highs and the lower lows. | by Tessa McLean | SFGATE

We just broke ground on America's first next-gen nuclear facility designed by TerraPower. This plant is safer, cheaper, and more reliable than existing ones, aiming to revolutionize power generation in the U.S. and globally. | by Bill Gates | GATESNOTES

China's yuan is now Russia's main foreign currency, replacing the dollar and euro. | UNN

A fungus living in the sea can break down the plastic polyethylene, but only after it's been exposed to UV light. | by Annika Vaksmaa | NIOZ

Apple left out a lot of small updates at its WWDC keynote this year. Here are some of the coolest ones: iPhone bezels now have animations, you can type in Spanglish without toggling keyboards, and the flashlight app has new animations. Plus, widgets are easier to resize, the Vision Pro shows your keyboard in VR, and macOS Sequoia has nostalgic wallpapers. | by Wes Davis | THE VERGE

Apple Vision Pro users can now watch House of the Dragon in an updated immersive Iron Throne Room environment on the visionOS Max app. | by Ryan Christoffel | 9TO5MAC

Spatial Personas in visionOS 2 can now high five, fist bump, and touch fingers with visual and audio feedback. | by Tim Hardwick | MACRUMORS

💡Excited about this. One of the things I enjoy doing with my Vision Pro is Facetime. And anything that makes it more natural is great.

Also can’t wait to try out the new dual-4K-monitor widescreen for working virtually.

Sebg argues that Jupyter Notebooks are the fast food of coding—convenient but often unhealthy for long-term projects.| by yobibyte | YOBIBYTE

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told Caltech grads to pursue "zero-billion-dollar markets," which are markets with no current value but huge future potential. He emphasized the importance of resilience and innovation, encouraging graduates to see setbacks as opportunities for new directions. | by Jowi Morales | Tom's Hardware

💡Just figured out what I love so much about Jensen. He’s like a nice Elon. Not saying Elon isn’t also nice; I know he is. Just saying he’s often not.

I love seeing—and having others see—that you can be a murderer-ambitious-creative-person, and still be kind most of the time.

Ro Arepally predicts that generative AI will actually increase the demand for software engineers over the next 20 years, not decrease it. The idea is that AI will make software engineering more accessible, similar to how autopilot systems made flying more accessible, leading to more tech companies and higher salaries for engineers. | by Ro Arepally | ROAREPALLY

The widely held view that sperm counts in men are dropping around the world may be wrong, according to a new study by the University of Manchester, Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada, and Cryos International, Denmark. | by UofMNews | UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER

Curiositry argues that perfectionism is about optimizing at the wrong scale, suggesting that focusing too much on perfecting small details can lead to missing the bigger picture. | by Curiositry | AUTODIDACTS

38% of webpages that existed in 2013 are no longer accessible a decade later.

Derek Sivers explains why you should create a /now page on your website, basically a page that tells people what you're focused on right now. | by Derek Sivers | SIVERS

💡I had one of these way back in the 10’s. I’ll have one again soon, but it’ll be in my personal API. Which will also show up on my site. 😀

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IDEAS

An X thread I posted about increased production of goods and services after AI, and how it doesn’t make sense if 90% of people don’t have money to buy the stuff…

Profile Picture

ᴅᴀɴɪᴇʟ ᴍɪᴇssʟᴇʀ @DanielMiessler

tw

There's a critical problem with moving towards AGI and ASI in a way that increasingly replaces human workers.

Who is going to buy all the stuff?

Sure—we'll be able to make 1000X more stuff, but people won't have jobs—and therefore money—so who are we making all the stuff for?

3:56 PM • Jun 16, 2024

31 Likes   6 Retweets   15 Replies

Venkat Rao argues that in a world dominated by AI and robots, the key to human survival isn't being smarter but being more mediocre. He suggests that mediocrity is an independent meta-trait crucial for evolutionary fitness and long-term survival. | by Venkatesh Rao | RIBBONFARM

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DISCOVERY

Pop Culture's Oligopoly: Why Everything Feels Like a Sequel EXPERIMENTAL HISTORY

Dream Machine — An AI model that makes high-quality, realistic videos fast from text and images. | by Luma Labs AI | Dream Machine

Nvidia Warp — A Python framework for high-performance GPU simulation and graphics. | by NVIDIA | GITHUB

The "Infinite Content Ideas Generator" — A 2-step AI prompt approach to never run out of content ideas. | by Moritz Kremb | THEPROMPTWARRIOR

You can now design and manufacture your own chip, and this video shows you how. | by Robert Feranec | YOUTUBE

LLM Mojo - The project ports Andrej Karpathy's llm.c to Mojo, leveraging performance enhancements like vectorization and parallelization. | by dorjeduck | GITHUB

Ollama v0.1.45 — Enhanced GPU discovery and multi-GPU support with concurrency. | by Ollama Team | GITHUB

SQLite is likely used more than all other database engines combined. | SQLITE

Starlink Mini — A new portable Starlink dish designed for camping, RVs, and other mobile uses. | by Starlink Hardware | STARLINKHARDWARE

Max Leiter has a simple but powerful tip: ship something every day. It doesn't have to be big, just something you can point to. | by Max Leiter | MAX LEITER BLOG

👉 Continue reading online to avoid the email cutoff issue 👈

RECOMMENDATION OF THE WEEK

This week I recommend you check out my list of truths it took me a very long time to learn.

MY LIST OF HARD-WON LIFE LESSONS

APHORISM OF THE WEEK

The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.

Hannah Arendt

I would like to move more to a model where I support my work with memberships, courses, and revenue from the apps that I build—rather than sponsorships.

To help me realize this, I’d like to invite you to become a UL member.

Here’s what you get:

  • Entry into the best online community I’ve ever been a part of.
  • We’re voraciously curious, we’re constantly reading, constantly learning, and we share what we learn with others. But most importantly, we’re kind. We’re a community of helping people become their best selves.
  • An insanely great Book Club, which has been running for like 5 years straight!
  • Additional monthly meetups where we share tools, routines, personal challenges, and lots of other stuff you can’t get anywhere else
  • Significant discounts on my paid offerings
  • Access to private UL events
  • And more…

Honestly there are lots of benefits to being a member that make it worth more than the price, but at basically $8/month the community is worth it just by itself.

Become Part of Our UL Community

Thank you. I truly appreciate your support of the work that I do.

-Daniel