Unsupervised Learning Newsletter NO. 385

Unsupervised Learning is a Security, AI, and Meaning-focused podcast that looks at how best to thrive as humans in a post-AI world. It combines original ideas, analysis, and mental models to bring not just the news, but why it matters and how to respond.

Greetings!,

This week I'm thinking a lot about operationalization and pipelines. Like, if you're a business, it doesn't matter what your best humans can do once or three times. What matters is what you can do as a process, with consistently high quality.

What are the one-offs in your life that should be turned into pipelines?

Have a great week!

🤖 AI's next big thing: Digital Assistants 🔓 Gmail Validation Flaw: Scammers exploit security feature 🚗 Toyota Cloud Leak: 260,000 Japanese service records exposed 🛡️ AI Defenders: Protecting your AI models 🤖🗣️ ChatGPT Webinar: Dos and Don'ts for Company Security 🔧 Jetpack Jank: Urgent update for WordPress plugin 🛰️ Sanctioned Satellite Hacking: DEFCON's space challenge 💻 NVIDIA Superchip: Game-changing GPU technology 🎓 Andrew's Mini AI Courses: Generative AI, Diffusion Models, and Langchain 🧠 Google AI Courses: 9 free courses for everyone 📄 New AI Paper: ByteFormer for classification without decoding 🏢 Meta's Office Return: 3 days a week starting in September

MY WORK

AI's Next Big Thing is Digital Assistants
My recent essay about the next big thing in the AI-ification of our lives. MORE


SECURITY NEWS

Gmail Validation Flaw
Google's new Gmail security feature is being exploited by hackers to scam users, undermining the email service's security reputation.

- Gmail's blue checkmark sender verification system is being tricked by scammers
- Cybersecurity engineer Chris Plummer discovered the flaw and alerted Google
- Google initially dismissed the issue, but later acknowledged it and listed it as a top priority fix

Stay vigilant as the verification system remains broken until Google resolves the issue. MORE

Toyota Cloud Leak, Again
Toyota faces another cloud leak, exposing 260,000 Japanese service records and customer data from other Asian and Oceanic countries.

- Toyota apologizes for yet another cloud leak due to misconfigured cloud environment
- 260,000 Japanese service records have been exposed since 2015, along with customer data from other countries
- Company claims no evidence of data misuse and has implemented a system to monitor cloud environments MORE

AI Defenders
Defending your AI models is crucial, and this article provides valuable insights and advice on how to do it effectively.

• The article discusses the importance of protecting AI models from adversarial attacks and data poisoning.

• It highlights the need for robust security measures, such as monitoring and validating input data.

• The author emphasizes the role of AI explainability in detecting and mitigating potential threats.

• Advice includes investing in AI security tools, training staff on AI risks, and collaborating with security experts.

• Regular audits and updates to AI models are also recommended to maintain their integrity and effectiveness. MORE

Sponsor

Jetpack Jank
WordPress has issued an urgent update to fix a critical flaw in the widely-used Jetpack plugin, affecting over five million sites.

- The vulnerability was discovered during an internal security audit and affects an API present in the plugin since version 2.0, released in November 2012.
- Authors on a site could potentially use this flaw to manipulate any files in the WordPress installation.
- 102 new versions of Jetpack have been released to remediate the bug, and there's no evidence of exploitation in the wild yet.
- Users are advised to update their Jetpack plugin to the latest version to avoid potential threats. MORE

Sanctioned Satellite Hacking
The US government is asking hackers at DEFCON to attack their Moonlighter satellite while it's in space. This is a satellite specifically designed to be a hacking sandbox in space. It does feel a little like giving pentesters access to the test environment when it looks nothing like prod, though. MORE


TECHNOLOGY NEWS

🔥 New AI Paper: Tree of Thoughts 🌳
A new paper came out about a better way to do prompting that works better than all previous methods. This one works by exploring multiple options down multiple steps, but it uniquely has the ability to go backward and try other paths if the current path results in a dead-end. In other words it's able to explore multiple steps down multiple options and find the best match/answer. Even better, it shipped with a Github repo that gives examples! Really powerful. I'll be implementing this very soon in my platform. MORE | PAPER | GITHUB REPO

NVIDIA Superchip
NVIDIA just changed the GPU game forever with its new Grace Hopper GPU chip. 

• Each module has 576GB of memory, unified between the CPU and GPU

• Uses low-power DDR memory

• 72 CPU cores, 900 GB/sec cross-chip bandwidth

• 4 PETAflops 

• They're going to connect 8 of them together using NVLink, with 900GB/second between them

• And they're connecting 32 of those together to create 1 exaflop in a single system

• The entire thing functions as one GPU!

Holy crap this is going to be insane. And yes, I'm investing in NVIDIA. ANNOUNCEMENT | YOUTUBE ANNOUNCEMENT TALK

Andrew's Mini AI Courses
Andrew Ng has released three short courses on Generative AI, Diffusion Models, and Langchain. Back before I joined Apple his ML course was the one I did to learn ML/AI, and I highly recommend his courses. These are great and very needed right now. MORE | BUILD CHAT APPS | BUILD LANGCHAIN APPS

Google AI Courses
Google also launched 9 new courses that are free for everyone. Topics include GenAI, LLMs, Attention, and other topics. MORE

New AI Paper: Bytes Are All You Need
Researchers developed ByteFormer, a model that performs classification directly on file bytes without decoding, achieving 77.33% ImageNet Top-1 accuracy on TIFF files and 95.42% on WAV files. ByteFormer also has privacy-preserving applications. MORE

Meta's Office Return
Meta Platforms announced employees must return to the office three days a week starting in September, marking the company's strictest policy change since embracing remote work during the pandemic. MORE

HUMAN NEWS

Parallel Profits
Conservative Americans are building a parallel economy to cater to their values and preferences.

- The article discusses the rise of conservative companies targeting God-fearing, gun-toting patriots.
- Examples include Tusk and Rumble as alternatives to Google and YouTube, and Patriot Mobile as a Christian conservative wireless network.
- PublicSq, an online marketplace, hosts 40,000 firms devoted to freedom, family, and the Constitution.
- However, building viable alternatives to common products and pulling patrons from big firms is challenging
- Some conservative companies focus on strengthening conservative hotbeds, like Conservative Move and RedBalloon. MORE

Indian Curriculum Chaos
India is removing periodic table and evolution content from school textbooks, leaving experts baffled and concerned.

- Periodic table, evolution, and other foundational topics cut from curriculum for under-16s
- Changes affect 134 million students aged 11-18 in India's schools
- Over 4,500 scientists, teachers, and science communicators signed an appeal to reinstate axed content
- Critics argue removal of fundamental concepts stifles curiosity and hinders understanding
- Some suggest changes driven by religious groups and political influences MORE

Venus Unmasked
Venus is shining bright in the sky, and here's why it's the perfect time to take a look at her.

- Venus is currently at its brightest, making it easy to spot in the night sky
- Its brightness is due to its proximity to the sun and its dense carbon dioxide atmosphere reflecting light
- Venus undergoes phases like our moon, which Galileo used as evidence for the heliocentric solar system model
- Some upcoming celestial events include Mars passing through the Beehive star cluster and a tight triangle formation with Venus, Mars, and the crescent moon  MORE

Cable TV Decline
Cable now has the fewest subscribers since 1992. YouTube TV is the only winner right now. MORE


IDEAS & ANALYSIS

Purple is the Way
My buddy Jason had a great post about Purple Teaming this weekend and I liked what I came up with for a yes/and reply.

• Red > Blue > Purple < Blue < Red.

Or, put another way,

• Challenge > Growth > You Get Stronger < Growth < Challenge

Red = Challenge
Purple = Growth
You Get Stronger = Outcome

So basically you can't grow without challenge, and that's what Red is there for. But the purpose is the improvement of self, which is what Blue is there for. MORE


NOTES

Big Platform News!
I am about to make the biggest change to my tech stack I've made in over a decade, if not ever. I'm going to be consolidating my platforms into a single solution. This will unify the newsletter and the website so the team can put out content much more efficiently. I anticipate bumps in the road!

• I'm worried about email delivery being wonky

• I'm worried about the process of migrating subscriptions from Memberful to the new platform. They both use Stripe on the backend so that's good, but I hope there isn't a bunch of double-charge / confusion drama from the transition. If there is, I'll make it right. Just be patient with me during the move please!

• Unknown gotchas. With a move this big there are bound to be surprises, and I'm mostly ok with that. It's only the top two above that I'm really working to avoid

• One downside is that the URL structure for the site will be different because the new place doesn't support custom URL paths yet. So I'll lose a lot of SEO, but I don't mind so much because AI is going to eat SEO anyway.

Anyway, the TLDR is that things are about to be super smooth and efficient going forward, which will result in more and better content, but things might get rocky for a few weeks during the switch. Please bear with us!

Trump = Ukraine Loses
I don't think nearly as much about politics as I used to. For me the world is security and AI right now. But one thought I had recently was that Ukraine will be in horrible shape if Trump gets re-elected. They'd basically lose the war overnight. He went on CNN and gave a perfect, pro-Russia position on Ukraine, refusing to blame Russia for the invasion and saying he'd end the conflict in 24 hours. There's still a lot of time between now and the winner having control in 2025, but this is the one issue I'm tracking closely. Just imagine how much effort Russia is about to spend on getting him re-elected. It's their only chance for them to win the war.

Superhuman Referral
If you've thought about trying out Superhuman before and are interested in getting a free month, you can sign up with my link and get one! I've been using Superhuman for years now and it's absolutely my favorite email client ever. It's very Vim/Shortcuts and Keyboard friendly and very conscious of how high-performers get work done. Cannot recommend enough. MORE

Four Happy Homies at EDC
This is my favorite picture from EDC this year. Remember what I said last week about regularly scheduled homie-time. It's essential. MORE


DISCOVERY

llm-exe — A buddy of mine created his own Langchain alternative built on Typescript. He was unhappy with how Langchain abstracts things so much so he built a system that's more transparent and usable. I'm messing with it now and giving him feedback, and he'd love to get your feedback as well! MORE

State of GPT — The absolute, hands-down, best 42 minutes you'll ever spend on learning how to make killer GPT prompts. This is a full presentation by one of the masters, Andrej Karpathy. If you're messing with AI this is a MUST. MORE

A photographer's perfect shot of a pyramid, the moon, and an airplane. MORE

Someone combined the Photoshop AI beta with Blender and Midjourney to create a full AI-generated game environment. MORE

An unbelievable thread about a photographer taking a shot of the international space station against the moon. He got attacked by flat earthers who claimed the shot was faked, and the resulting thread is fantastic. MORE

Unpacking Shellcode with Ghidra Emulator MORE

Chain of Thought Hub — A rating system for LLM reasoning performance. MORE

Peelian Principles MORE

Stop disqualifying great candidates with bad questions. MORE


RECOMMENDATION OF THE WEEK

Watch the whole State of GPT talk by Andrej Karpathy. If you're into AI it'll be the best time you've spent on a video, and if you're not into AI maybe it'll help you get started. MORE

 
APHORISM OF THE WEEK

"The language of friendship is not words but meanings. It is an intelligence above language."

Henry David Thoreau

💙 Thank you for supporting this work. I'm glad you find it worth your patronage.

Thank you for reading. To become a member of UL and get more content and access to the community, you can become a member.

Follow me on Twitter

Follow via RSS

Forward UL to friends

Tweet about UL

Share UL with colleagues