UL NO. 438: Confusion is a Muse

Sonnet 3.5 Support in Fabric, CISA AI Tabletop exercise, Kaspersky ban, China Invasion Scenario, Langchain disilussionment, more…

Author

Daniel Miessler
June 24, 2024

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

Registration for AUGMENTED v2 in July 2026 is now open. About half the slots are already gone. Sign up now by clicking below, or check UL Chat for your discount codes! RESERVE YOUR SLOT

🧠CHEAT CODE: Become a UL member to get a discount code of $250 off the course. BECOME A MEMBER

  • Fabric now supports Anthropic’s Sonnet 3.5. It’s really damn good. Just update and then run:

    fabric —listmodels

    echo “what’s the meaning of life “ | fabric -sp create_5_sentence_summary -m claude-3-5-sonnet-20240620

  • One note though, Sonnet and Haiku throw a lot of copyright failures. I guess they’re trying to push people towards Opus? Not sure why they do that, but I frequently can’t use extract_wisdom with Sonnet because it won’t summarize a podcast.

  • I’m gearing up for Vegas / Blackhat / DEFCON. Hope to see you there! Come see me. I’ll have stickers, but that’s about the limit of swag I’m comfortable with. I might make UL shirts at some point, but it won’t say Unsupervised Learning on them. It’ll just be the UL logo by itself on the center front, like a superhero decal.

—

  • 🔥I’ve been feeling quite grateful for my life lately, and somehow superpowered. Not just because things are going well, which they are, but most importantly because I feel I’m living an authentic life.

    I feel like this newsletter has been 300% better—at least in my eyes—because it’s lost its form and taken on the form of authenticity. It’s taken on the form of me, and what I’m thinking and doing and learning.

    It’s no longer a newsletter in which I must do newsletter things. It’s now just a list of what I’m seeing and reading and learning, which I send out in something called a newsletter.

    The difference is tiny and monumental, and I hope you’ve 1) noticed the difference, and 2) have enjoyed it.

    Let me know. 🫶 

Ok, let’s get to it…

MY WORK

This is a stream-of-consciousness style collection of thoughts on US politics, the upcoming election, and I guess politics in general. Skip it if you don’t like politics.

My View on The State of US Politics

Member Post: A set of thoughts on how I currently see US politics and the upcoming election…

danielmiessler.com/p/view-state-us-politics

Hey there!

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.

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

-Daniel

STORIES

CISA held its first AI security tabletop exercise with over 50 experts from government and industry to simulate responses to AI security incidents. The exercise, led by the Joint Cyber Defense Collaborative (JCDC), aimed to improve operational collaboration and information sharing for AI-related threats. | CISA

Extremists in the US are using AI to spread hate speech, recruit, and radicalize faster than ever. Examples: President Biden using racial slurs and Emma Watson reading Mein Kampf. | WIRED 

The U.S. has banned the sale of Kaspersky antivirus software, citing security risks from Russia. If you're using it, switch to another provider. | TECHCRUNCH 

There's a new set of high-severity vulnerabilities in Asus routers that let hackers take control without any user interaction. Patch these ASAP. | CVSS 9.8 | ARSTECHNICA 

Sponsor

Free AI SOC Analyst for the Summer

Facing summer staffing challenges? Dropzone’s AI SOC analysts autonomously investigate your alerts, replicating the techniques of expert analysts, so your team gets to focus on only the real threats and other high-impact projects. Try it free for July and August. No playbooks or coding required - just a quick 30-minute setup. We've got your back during the busy season.

Dmitri Alperovitch imagines a detailed scenario of China invading Taiwan in 2028, focusing on an air assault strategy due to the rough Taiwan Strait waters. | by Dmitri Alperovitch | WIRED 

The U.S. is moving to limit investments in China's AI, semiconductor, and quantum computing sectors to curb China's tech advancements. The new rules will impact private equity, venture capital funds, and U.S. limited partners' investments in foreign-managed funds and convertible debt. | TOMSHARDWARE 

💡Cool, but we need to be building a lot more energy production like them as well.

Jake Lang, a January 6 rioter, has organized a nationwide armed militia from prison. Lang's militia has thousands of members and uses Telegram for coordination. | by Leah Feiger | WIRED 

A study says directly at the camera during online job interviews can significantly boost your evaluation scores. | by Hiroshima University | PHYS.ORG 

AI Agents and The RaaS Revolution (Results As A Service) — Discusses the evolution from SaaS to RaaS, emphasizing the role of AI agents in delivering results. MEDIUM 

Sam Lijin has a new post on how to get structured output from LLMs, covering various frameworks and their pros and cons. The post dives into why converting English to JSON is tough and compares different methods like parsing malformed JSON versus constraining token generation. | by Sam Lijin | BOUNDARYML 

Laura Kipnis got invited to join an AI project called Rebind, where AI versions of authors interact with readers about classic books. She thought it was a scam at first but found the idea intriguing. The project aims to make high-level, interactive reading experiences accessible to everyone, using AI to simulate conversations with authors. | by Laura Kipnis | WIRED 

Fabian Both from Octomind explains why they stopped using LangChain for their AI agents, highlighting how its rigid high-level abstractions made their codebase more complex and less productive. Instead, they now use modular building blocks, which simplified their development process and increased team happiness and productivity. | by OCTOMIND | OCTOMIND BLOG 

My buddy Evan and long-time ULer, Evan Oslik, argues that our obsession with convenience is making us less human, disconnecting us from real-life interactions and essential skills. | by Evan Oslik | SNAKE EYES SOFTWARE

Solar generated a fifth of global electricity at midday on the summer solstice. | EMBER-CLIMATE

Using SSH as a sudo replacement is an interesting idea. The author suggests that SSH can be used to execute commands as another user, potentially replacing sudo in some scenarios. | WHYNOTHUGO

Apple is renaming Apple ID to Apple Account. The change aims to simplify the naming but expect to see both terms used interchangeably for a while. | by Adam Engst | TIDBITS 

A group of 17 secondary schools in Southwark, London, are going smartphone-free to combat the negative effects of phone use on students' well-being and education. | THE GUARDIAN 

💡I love how Jonathan Haidt’s work is spreading so fast.

I think the vibe of “social media is the new smoking” has some merit to it.

It’s not quite that clear, though, because in moderation social media can be useful, whereas smoking is always bad for your health. Although I guess you can argue for a pro if you do it socially?

Gavin Newsom wants to ban smartphones in schools to improve student focus and reduce distractions. More impact likely from Haidt. | by Gavin Newsom | POLITICO 

House prices are surging again, with a global index (excluding China) up over 3% year-on-year. American prices are up 6.5%, Australian by 5%, and Portuguese prices are soaring. | ECONOMIST 

Insufficient sun exposure is now a serious public health issue, potentially causing hundreds of thousands of deaths annually in the US and Europe, and increasing the risk of various diseases like cancer, cardiovascular disease, and multiple sclerosis. The study suggests that while vitamin D has been considered the main benefit of sun exposure, other mechanisms like nitric oxide release from the skin might also play significant roles. | NCBI 

💡I can’t wait for Huberman to cover this topic. Seems like getting sun early in the morning is super good for you (but that could be vibes).

My question is how much of that is circadian rhythm stuff, i.e., through the eyes, or how much is from like sun hitting the skin? And if it’s early, and the UV index is still low, does that mean it’s net-good?

Can’t wait to see more science on this. And in the meantime I’m going to treat very early and very late sun as kind of net-good.

Having more positive experiences in life is linked to lower odds of brain disorders like Alzheimer's and slower cognitive decline. A new study from Columbia suggests that brain mitochondria play a key role in this. | by Columbia Medicine | MEDICALXPRESS 

Secret Ted Cruz Fundraising Documents (Slightly Redacted) — A look at Ted Cruz's fundraising events and the redaction of personal information to comply with social media policies. The documents were found in the Senate Refectory and went viral on X before being taken down for containing personal information. | by Pablo Manríquez | CAPITOL PRESS 

💡One thing AI is going to bring us—and that I’m personally building—is the ability to gather intelligence continuously from thousands of sources, and then craft that into timelines and narratives.

This is the type of thing that required massive skill and headcount before. Like only journalists and spies were basically doing this, and there are/were so few of them!

Now, people like me will have AI that can gather constantly and turn that content into intelligence output.

Kolari Vision's inaugural solar eclipse photo competition crowned Ryan Spangenberg's shot of a plane skimming the eclipse as the winner. | by Matt Growcoot | PETAPIXEL 

IDEAS

Toddler —> Ph.D in around 4 years. Insanity.

—

Just don’t call it AI.

Click to read the thread

DISCOVERY

🔥 Web-Check — A free and open-source tool that lets you see everything about any website. You just enter a URL, click "Scan," and it gives you all the available information about the site. | by Alicia Sykes | GITHUB 

Haize Labs — Automated red-teaming against LLMs. Interesting stuff going on here, will be watching closely. X

Agentic LLM Vulnerability Scanner — An open-source tool for fuzzing and stress testing LLMs with customizable rule sets. | by msoedov | GITHUB

Incogni — A service that removes your personal info from the web to block spam calls and protect privacy. | by Incogni | 9TO5MAC 

Confusion is a Muse — Phil Eaton argues that confusion is a powerful tool for learning and writing, especially in software development. He says that embracing confusion and documenting the journey to understanding can lead to valuable insights and endless writing material. | NOTES

Complexity Expands to Fill the Space Available — Tom Wilson argues that complexity tends to expand to fill the space available, much like gas in a container. He suggests that limiting resources and constraints can actually drive simplicity and efficiency in systems. MEDIUM 

The Winter of Content — How Game of Thrones changed media, driving traffic and homogenizing journalism. | The Verge 

A niche salary database created from viral videos.  | by Salary Transparent Street | SALARYTRANSPARENTSTREET

The Internet is Now for Bots, Not Humans — Chris Butler argues that the internet is now more for bots than humans, with bots making up nearly half of all internet traffic. He suggests this shift changes how we design and interact with information. | CHRISBUTLER 

An impossibly thin fabric can cool you down by over 16 degrees. This fabric uses nanotechnology to reflect sunlight and dissipate body heat, making it ideal for hot climates. | FASTCOMPANY 

RECOMMENDATION OF THE WEEK

Get a copy of Meditations by Marcus Aurelius and keep it by your bed.

I find it’s one of the best ways to:

  1. Fall asleep

  2. Feel grateful for my life as I’m doing so

APHORISM OF THE WEEK

❝

Inspired by love, guided by knowledge.

Bertrand Russell

Hey there,

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.

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

-Daniel