UL NO. 441: Substrate, OpenAIs AGI Levels, US Literacy Rates

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

• SECURITY

• AI / TECH

• HUMANS

• IDEAS

• DISCOVERY

• RECOMMENDATION OF THE WEEK

• APHORISM OF THE WEEK

NOTES

Hey there!

Wow, so much going on. And only a few weeks until Hacker Camp in Vegas.

• Friend of UL, Ray Alner, is looking for a new position as a Systems Engineer. He has experience in DevOps, Cyber, leadership, and a whole bunch of other stuff. Also, on a personal note, Ray is one of UL’s smartest and kindest members, and someone should absolutely snatch him up before they miss out. REACH OUT TO RAY DIRECTLY

• I’ve brought back the SECURITY, TECH, and HUMANS sections. I love the idea of just one section, but I found myself wanting to sort them to make it easier to read. Which means you were probably feeling that way too. Sorry. Fixed it.

• I added new levels to the AGI definitions (4 and 5) within the RAID AI Definitions Resource. MORE

• I feel like Apple Notes is my actual operating system, and macOS is just the window manager.

Ok, let’s get to it…

MY WORK

👉This is the big one! I’ve been thinking about and writing this one for months. There’s a high chance that this will be the most impactful project I ever create. READ THE ANNOUNCEMENT

Would really love for you check it out. And even better—get involved.

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My new piece on Dynamic Content Summaries and how I think they’re going to be the way we view content in the future. MORE

Exploring the idea of Personal vs. Business brands, and which is better for different types of creator. MORE

SECURITY

Kaspersky Shuts Down U.S. Operations — Kaspersky is shutting down its business in the U.S. starting July 20, following sanctions and bans from the U.S. government. | MORE

AT&T says nearly all cellular customers and some landline users have had their data stolen, but now there’s an interesting twist being reported by Kim Zetter at Wired. Evidently AT&T paid a member of the hacking team nearly $300,000 to delete the only copy of all the data. | MORE

Russia is using AI-enhanced software called "Meliorator" to create fake online personas for disinformation campaigns. This tool helps manage these personas and spread false information through social media. | MORE

A new Exim vulnerability with a CVSS score of 9.1 allows attackers to bypass attachment extension blocking and deliver executables. Over 1.5M email servers are affected. | CVSS 9.1 | MORE 

Google is now offering passkeys for high-risk users who join its Advanced Protection Program, replacing the previous requirement for a physical security key. | MORE

A new Exim vulnerability with a CVSS score of 9.1 allows attackers to bypass attachment extension blocking and deliver executables. Over 1.5M email servers are affected. | CVSS 9.1 | MORE 

Foreign influence campaign analysis from US Intelligence:

• Russia is backing Trump (I’m guessing because he’ll pull us out of Ukraine).

• Iran is acting as a "chaos agent," in its influence campaigns, focusing on exploiting U.S. political and social tensions rather than backing a specific candidate.

• China is mostly staying out of U.S. elections, seeing little benefit in influencing the outcome. They're more focused on data collection for future influence operations.

  MORE

GitLab has a critical flaw (CVE-2024-6385) in its CI/CD pipelines that lets attackers run pipelines as any user. Upgrade now. | CVSS 9.6 | MORE

AI / TECH

OpenAI’s AGI Levels — OpenAI has published their 5-tier ladder for AI progress. I’m honestly not a fan, other than Level 5. | MORE

AI Startups Raising $100M+ in 2024 — Here's the full list of 28 US AI startups that have raised $100M or more in 2024. | MORE

Anthropic has added new features to Claude that help automate prompt engineering. | MORE

New Fiber Speeds — A new fiber optic network transmits data at speeds above 400 terabytes per second, breaking the current record by nearly 33%. And this is on existing fiber, not some special new stuff. | MORE

YouTube Music Tests AI Playlists — YouTube Music is testing a new feature that lets you use AI to generate a playlist by describing what you want to hear. Premium users in the US can use a chat UI to enter descriptions like "catchy pop choruses" or "upbeat pop anthems." | by Emma Roth | MORE 

There's a surge in delivery startups like Hailify, which pivoted from managing Uber and Lyft gigs to delivering thousands of parcels from China-based companies like Shein and Temu to U.S. shoppers. They see an opportunity to take market share from FedEx, USPS, and UPS. | by Ann Gehan | MORE

HUMANS

Why Women Are Disappearing From Tech — The percentage of venture deals for companies with female founders has dropped from 6.5% to 5.7% this year. Companies with at least one female co-founder are also seeing less funding, down from 27% to 16.6%. | by Jessica E. Lessin | MORE

Houston Is on a Path to an All-Out Power Crisis — For the 2.2 million people in Houston who lost power after Hurricane Beryl, the situation is dire. The city's power infrastructure is so fragile that even moderate storms are causing massive outages. And people are getting very angry. | MORE

Tour de France Riders Are Inhaling Carbon Monoxide — Multiple Tour de France teams are using carbon monoxide inhalation to enhance altitude training. This controversial practice involves inhaling a deadly gas to boost performance, and while it's not banned by WADA, it raises serious ethical and health concerns. | MORE

130 Million U.S. Adults Have Low Literacy Skills — Over half of Americans aged 16 to 74 read below a sixth-grade level, impacting their daily lives and families. | by Dr. Iris Feinberg | MORE

Colorado Poultry Workers Test Positive for Bird Flu — Three poultry workers in Colorado have tested presumptive positive for bird flu after an outbreak at a commercial egg facility. This virus has already killed over 6 million birds and is now infecting dairy cattle across the state. | MORE

Just 4 in 10k Galaxies May Host Intelligent Aliens — A new study suggests that intelligent alien life might be incredibly rare because it requires a planet with plate tectonics, oceans, and continents. Only about 0.003% to 0.2% of exoplanets meet these criteria, making the odds of finding such civilizations extremely low. | by Robert Stern and Taras Gerya | MORE

IDEAS

VCs Are Buying Medical Practices
I’ve got an doctor friend who’s been telling me about how venture capital is moving into medical practices. They’re coming in and doing what you would expect, which is looking for ways to make more money. Except they’re largely doing it unethically, i.e., by having the places sell stuff patients don’t need, request tests that are unnecessary, etc.

I feel like this is another example of like big investors buying up single-family homes and then renting them. Or storage spaces.

It’s like—the people with the money collect all the things, and then they can do whatever they want with them. And the purpose never seems to be to make things better. It’s always to make more money.

What am I missing? And if I’ve got this right, what are we to do about it? Capitalism is the best system we have, so this should be legal I think. But how do we keep the super-rich from just buying everything and making life worse for everyone else?

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Most Conspiracies Come From Not Realizing How Often Things Fail | MORE

Therapy, Rumination, and Untying Knots | MORE

DISCOVERY

ffuf on Lambda — ffuf running on AWS Lambda and streamed to a web browser. | by defparam | MORE

Bullfrog — A Github Action that secures your workflows by controlling outbound network connections. You can define allowed IPs and domains or use audit mode to see all connections without blocking them. | by BullfrogSec | MORE

Everything You See Is a Computational Process, If You Know How to Look — Lance Fortnow argues that computation is everywhere if you know how to see it. He compares everyday processes like mailing a letter to computational operations and even describes randomness as a complex computational process. | by Lance Fortnow | MORE

The "Shaan Puri Emotion Eliciter" prompt lets you input your writing and get specific suggestions to make it more emotionally engaging. It maintains the original intent of your writing while enhancing it using each of the seven emotions. | by Moritz Kremb | MORE 

WTF Happened to Blogs | by Michal Pándy | MORE

As an Employee, You Are Disposable — The recent tech layoffs have shown that employees are disposable in the eyes of executives. It doesn’t matter if a company is profitable or not; layoffs can still happen, and executives continue to earn huge sums of money amidst these cuts. | by Nelson | MORE

You Never Control the Arc of Your Career — This piece dives into how career paths are often shaped by forces beyond our control, using Bruce Springsteen as an example. | by Michael Eaton | MORE

Smoking vs. Lung Cancer Deaths. MORE

Learning Multiple Concepts from a Single Image — Unsupervised Concept Extraction (UCE) is a new task that extracts and recreates multiple concepts from a single image without any human annotations. | by Shaozhe Hao et al | MORE

Change Detection in Satellite Imagery — This study addresses semantic change detection using satellite image time series (SITS-SCD) by integrating both change detection and semantic segmentation. | by Elliot Vincent, Jean Ponce and Mathieu Aubry | MORE

89 Things I Know About Git Commits — A collection of insights about Git commits gathered over 12 years of experience in both small teams and large Open Source projects. | by Jamie Tanna | MORE

RECOMMENDATION OF THE WEEK

Check on your friends you haven’t heard from in a while.

Send them a text. It’s free, and they will appreciate being thought of.

APHORISM OF THE WEEK