US drone combat, extract ideas from any book, Pinker writing analysis, Flipper reversal, GPT-5 updates, and more…
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Welcome to Unsupervised Learning, 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. All right. Welcome to unsupervised learning. This is Daniel Missler. All right. Number 425. So you all know the deal here. Tons going on this week prepping for some paid talks. Going to be traveling to a few different states. Honestly really excited to be alive right now at this moment in human history, like all the different opportunities there are that are just popping off and I feel like there's always a conference, there's always people. There's so many people building right now, especially here in the Bay area. And I'm just excited about the optimism. Like the optimism has its own gravity, if that makes sense. And yeah hack build grind appreciate. That's pretty much the current vibe. So I wrote this piece called Efficient Security Principle. And I'm going to open this up in a new tab. And it's essentially explaining why a lot of security people are so upset, I think, over the course of their career. So one of the hardest things about being in security is just the frustration. And this came from the conversation with Deno, where he basically posted about raising the security minimum. And I was like, well, you know, the minimum is there for a reason. And I kind of wanted to capture that into a principle. And ideally I would have this be one item, but it was getting kind of long. So I broke it into these statements. Security baseline of an offering continuous downward pressure from customer excitement or reliance on a given thing. And then the baseline will be set at the point at which people will stop using it if it's any worse. But it can't go higher than that. And then the third piece of it, which these are all kind of saying the same thing, is that the better the offering is, or the more important it is, the lower the security baseline can go without losing people. And that's really, really important. So all this together basically means that the more essential a thing is, and the more awesome it is, the more people will put up with. And as we'll see when we move through this, it's the reason you shouldn't get too upset when the baseline is low. So the way we know something has the right amount of security is people just keep using it despite how insecure it is. Right? So online companies constantly getting hacked. My friend Sasha Geller basically talked about this one where he said that basically the biggest example of this is actually email, where it's like email gets everyone hacked. It's like the number one way to get hacked is to have email. But guess what? You need email. There's a reliance on it. It's like our national you know, our global infrastructure of it is basically emails to online banking. Everyone's getting constant fraud all the time. Door locks and the internet in general is pretty nasty. It's a cesspool, right? We use these things anyway because the value they provide massively outweighs the security risks, at least according to us in our own minds. And the moment people stop using something due to security being too bad, the baseline goes up. And Sasha had another good point in that. SMS is actually an example of this where it was deemed too nasty. And then we started moving to like app based tufa. So the way to actually use this is if you're a security tech professional, like down in the weeds, realize that it's not that level that matters at a bigger scale. So you want to like uplevel your thinking and realize it's not about us. It's not about the technical part of it. It's about how important is the offering. And that's what actually sets the baseline. And most importantly, do not take it personally. Don't take it personally that the baseline is low and you're showing them how to raise the baseline, but they're not doing anything about it, right. That's really key. And if you're a security leader, you know, you can have the same sort of problem and frustration of a technical person. And maybe you're also a technical leader. It doesn't really matter. But the point is like you can get frustrated as well. And the recommendation is first, make sure the security baseline is actually where the customer thinks it is. Maybe they're not complaining because they don't really know how bad it is. So once those are in alignment now, now you have sort of the same situation as the technical side where it's like look fine, innovative ways to raise the baseline without making it obvious or cause friction because people might want to higher baseline, but only if it doesn't cost them anything because they're only going to go as high as it can go without sacrificing that experience of this thing that they love. And I just think it's really powerful. So yeah, only as good as it needs to be to keep people from abandoning the service. And the more popular or essential the offering, the lower the security can be. This is in the summary here. And progress is still possible, especially with policy change and regulation, because that kind of like forces a baseline raise. But security experts loudly calling out how low the baseline is and gesturing wildly towards the solution seldom results in change. And most importantly, this is kind of the big takeaway is experts struggling with low security baselines should absorb the truth above and not let their job satisfaction and their mental health suffer. And got a bunch of notes here. But that's that's basically that piece. All right. A couple of really cool patterns here put into fabric this week. So the first one is like it'll analyze your prose according to my favorite writing book, which is The Sense of Style by Steven Pinker. And here's what it actually looks like after a run. This is. The analysis of me actually doing that, that essay. So I put that essay through here and this is the result I came back. So style analysis it's multiple different styles put together positive assessment. Critical assessment I talk a little bit too much about the writing itself I guess is what this is saying. It gives me examples of good writing from it. Things I can improve. No spelling mistakes, which is cool. I'm going to be using this to catch spelling from now on, and you start off with a 100 score. Oh, and it gives recommendations as well. But it starts off with 100 score and then deducts. So I got an 85. I got an 85 here because it took 15 points off for these things. So that's what that pattern does. And then this one is extract book recommendations. So this is insane. This is essentially any book you could think of that was probably brought in the training of a given model. And it's most that you could think of like a New York Times bestseller. Any big name book that you can think of is probably going to be in here. So open this one up and look at it. So this is a man search for Meaning by Viktor Viktor Frankl. And these are the recommendations that it gave me for what to do right to like improve your life. I mean look at these, these these are absolutely insane. Find meaning in life by dedicating yourself to a cause greater than yourself. Like even the prioritization here is really, really good. Take responsibility for your own life and choices. I mean, this is gorgeous and this all just came from running. I literally said Echo Man's search for meaning pipe into extract book recommendation and this is what it produced, right? This is so powerful. I'm just blown away every time we make one of these things. So those are two of the biggest ones that I put in. I actually put in more, but those are two of the big ones. So security stuff. Yeah. It looks like you can extract keys from M-series chips. I'm sure they'll fix that in the next iteration. After that, a lot of people are saying it's not really packable and that it's kind of a big problem. So and that if you do do a workaround, it might affect performance. But we'll see. And here's the other piece. We'll have to wait and see how real world these attacks are to know if it's like actually bad and the integration of drones with digitized command and control systems. Yeah, this is a US war fighting effort essentially, and they're calling it transformative trinity for autonomous, like very dangerous drones, which saved dystopian movie writers a lot of time. So that's that's good news. And yeah, along the lines of this, there's never been a better time to read Daniel Suarez's kill decision, which is all about autonomous drones. Actually, you should check out that book, a really, really good book. And Jess has a new strategy for tackling AI risks. Got the PDF here. Someone in China got arrested in New York for trying to sell Tesla's secret battery tech to undercover agents. I'm not sure if he thought he was selling it to China. I couldn't quite get that from the story. Canada is rethinking its ban of flipper zero, trying to go after misuse instead of just banning it outright, which I'm glad they listened to the feedback there. Avonte critical bug. This just continues to happen. Earth crushing Kraken. Yeah, I'm not sure how to pronounce that one, but basically a Abt group backed by the Chinese government hit over 70 organizations, mostly focused on governments, and Atlassian patched a critical SQL vulnerability. So myself and a bunch of other AI builders have found something really weird where anthropic smallest model haiku has been performing extremely well. And this one I did. What is this? So this is extract ideas. So I did extract ideas on a recent YouTube video of Jonathan Haidt coming on Rogan again. And if you look at these results here, they are remarkably similar, similar to each other. So like GPT for the first one is opus, which is like the best anthropic model. The second one is GPT four, which is the best OpenAI model. But this is the worst. It's the third level down of anthropic models, and these top level like quotes here really good. Not not quotes, but findings, ideas extracted. I mean, they're not obviously worse than any of the other two. And this has happened to me multiple times. So I'm really impressed with that. And a lot of people are reporting GPT five will be out this summer. And they're pointing to this interview that Sam Altman did with Lex. And but what he actually said was something good would come out soon, maybe like this summer. I think he might have said, like this summer. And some people are saying, well, maybe it'll be like a 4.5 release, but I don't think it's going to be five before the end of the year. That's my guess. Nvidia is patterning. Patterning. See, now you know, I don't use AI to write my stuff. I wrote this and that is misspelled. That's unfortunate. Yeah. Partnering with Hippocratic AI to introduce AI nurses for virtual patient care. So you basically looking at an iPad and it's like a face telling you what to do $9 an hour. It's actually an AI. Yeah. So there's a little point here most of the benefit will get from AI in the first few years. Won't be from doing work better than good humans, right? It's going to be doing work that otherwise would not have been done at all. So the great examples of this are therapists. We need way more therapists. We need billions of more therapists, like hundreds of millions or billions of therapists, potentially. We don't want to overindex on therapy, but we need so many therapists. We need billions of tutors, continuous tutors, that you can ask anything. Why? Well, because of this. Why? Because of this? Why? How many parents get tired of that question? How about somebody who doesn't get tired of that question? Right? And I'm not saying parents shouldn't be there to answer those questions. Of course they should. And so should teachers. But it's nice when somebody is shy or introverted or they're just alone and they have questions, you know, therapists, tutors and yeah, we don't have enough things watching for asteroids in the sky. It's extra eyes. Think of trillions of extra eyes and a little bit of brainpower tied to that skin cancer screening. How many people in the world have access to a doctor to say, hey, look at this mole? Very few, very few percentage of the entire planet have that ability. But now you can with AI, right? So that's what I'm excited about. US Department of Justice 16 state and district attorneys, district attorney generals. Actually, I think that's supposed to be pluralized attorneys general. Yeah. Lawsuit against Apple. Bottom line. And I've got a pro Apple biased, very fanboy leaning. Biased. I'm all about not avoiding bias, but actually just calling it out and naming it, which I think I saw Destiny talk about, which I thought was pretty smart. And yeah, Apple's now making iPhones in Brazil. And Tim Cook also just went to China to tell him everything's okay. And don't worry. Don't worry about the fact that we're trying to make everything not in China because you guys are crazy. He probably didn't say that, but I did. Apple and Tesla are losing market share in China. Meanwhile, as national loyalty rises, and my sort of spicy take here is one of China's greatest strengths is actually its nationalism. Right. They have too much I would say. Um, and I would say that the left in the US has too little. I would say like the far right in the US has too much. Can we can we have some medium, can we have some, uh, some moderation, please? That would be nice. Israel's government is reportedly running covert ops at US universities. This turns out to be a little bit kind of like a biased story. But that's why I put this in here. It's like, what's the difference between marketing and counter propaganda information operations? The difference is your perspective. That's that's the difference. Like, we should consider ourselves always being hit with propaganda and marketing or whatever. And like you use the different term based on what you think their goals are and how morally aligned you think their goals are with, like good or bad. Measles was eliminated in the US in 2000, and now it's back because people don't want to take vaccines. As long Covid brain fog could be from damaged blood vessels. That's a new study. People. Young people are a lot less happy. And we actually because of this, we fell out of the top 20 happiest nations in the United States. Uh, Alzheimer's might stem from a fat buildup in brain cells. UC Berkeley professor getting attacked for telling a student to get out of artillery range of San Francisco and San Jose if he wants to find a girlfriend, and he's just getting blasted for this weather forecast. Massively improved. This is a pretty cool seven day forecasts are now actually pretty accurate, and four day predictions now are as accurate as one day predictions from 30 years ago. Interesting. Yeah, four days versus one day. You imagine the level of complexity there. Germany legalized recreational marijuana. Blu ray is coming back because you always have access to it. You don't have to worry about it being pulled out of streaming. And it's still the highest quality. Cancer rates under 50 have surged by 80%. I think this might be in the US, but from 1990 to 2019. So that's what 30 years, basically 31 years married people are thriving way more than unmarried. According to a ten year long Gallup study. Bidets getting way more popular. Got some recommendations here for you. And, uh, a new way of thinking about the economy. I don't want to read this whole thing. Uh, just. I think everything is starting to come down to framing for me. It's like my universal theory. So, uh, the economy might be a thing where if you believe in optimism, if you become optimistic about the economy that has, like its own gravity, it has its own weight, its own power, because it turns into action, and then the action turns into reality. So it's like, once again, you have this link between understanding or framing or viewpoints that translates directly into what actually happen, which I just find fascinating. I think we should rethink how we use the term, uh, the word technical, which I laid out in a tweet thread. And this mostly affects women who. Often are the only people at a company who could do multiple things right. We're talking about being able to, like, navigate a business process, get people from one place to another, actually do deeply technical technology related work, but also deeply technical, like law related work or business related work, other things that are like super high end, very, very difficult stuff. And the the system would not be able to function. Nobody could explain things. Nobody could actually get the work done if it wasn't for these people who are there helping. And because it's not necessarily oriented around a piece of technology, they get really diminished. So I think we should redefine that. Yeah, I'm getting all the different AI devices coming in. I really just want something that record conversations and transcribe them and get them into my AI workflows. Going back to original style of the new summary, which is like a single sentence which which I did a lot up here, rereading the Sense of style. That's why I did that pattern really helps my writing. Every time I read it. I try to do it every like 2 or 3 years. Resubscribe to the Twitter API so I could do things like this. Boom, go down here, Twitter boom. So these are actually Twitter feeds that are in Feedly because I have the connection there and the API key put in. So that's pretty cool to be able to consolidate, bring everything in. You could also do it with Twitter lists which I use quite a bit. Yeah. Analyze pros talked about that one and getting into the three body problem on Netflix. Really enjoying this. The books were fantastic. Found this service called Opus Clip. Um, Jason pointed me to it. It's basically you take a video like this video, it'll be output and it cuts it up into pieces. And you're going to see some of these. You're going to see clips from like this will go out in my feeds and it'll be like, you know, a 32nd or 92nd or whatever little clip of a cool little section, but it does it automatically. Normally you would send this to like an editor, and it's really difficult because they have to know the subject matter to know what are the coolest parts of what you said. Well, this thing, you don't have to do that because it's actually automatic. You just upload it extracts like whatever, three or 5 or 10 different clips out of it. Rag Tune Tool for tuning and Optimizing rag Pipelines by Misbah, said collects, takes a web page, returns all the URLs, and switch back to this view. Open dev an open source project to clone and improve Devon Unreal Engine I mean, look at this. This is. Come on. This is content from Unreal Engine.
They're combing the streets.
It looks like sort of video I mean searching helps to.
How real.
If they arrest you too, they will take you to their headquarters and you will not return.
I'm more concerned. It looks like a six foot cat. It's got claws that can cut through. Vibranium alloy. Slightly tongue. But.
Let's just go forward. Okay. So let's boom down and take a closer look at this environment. Yeah, sure. Look at this. So we're talking about nanites. New adaptive tessellation feature. Look at this. So while I let you or something.
Yeah.
There you go. For artists to create a series of layers in the environment and then build up. So one angle that.
We're approaching this from. This is another. Speaking of.
Set dressing. Let's go check out that.
In terms of like creating content that's completely controllable in creative but realistic look as a skill. The secret to a meaningful life I love this so much. A long term, ambitious vision that pushes you to grow smarter, wealthier, and mentally stronger. That is very concise. A guide to espouse and use. Prompt injection and jailbreaking are not the same thing. By Simon Wilson and Recommendation of the week. Think about your hedonic baseline. So this is like well I'll just keep reading. So it's thinking about my life just walking upstairs or walking to the car. It's a stoic technique of imagining that you're not able to do these simple things. And as you start removing them from your life and imagining yourself without them, you can imagine how unhappy you would be now, like a Jedi or a monk or something would say, well, you shouldn't care about that. You shouldn't care about losing anything. But I like to appreciate the things that I do have, including the ability to walk outside in the sun and not not be assaulted or something to breathe fresh air like all these things. I'm trying to micro appreciate a thousand different things in my life, which is a very stoic thing. You imagine the things that you have, you imagine them gone, and then you get appreciation when you realize that you still have them. Right. So relationships, mobility, the ability to think, being in the Bay area at this crazy moment with AI and stuff, and it's like actively cultivate appreciation by lowering my baseline, what is the minimum thing that I need to be happy? And ideally that would be nothing. And it's just something I'm thinking about. So think about what you have and think about those things by subtraction and the aphorism of the week. Contentment is natural wealth. Luxury is artificial poverty, contentment is natural wealth and luxury is artificial poverty. Socrates Unsupervised Learning is produced and edited by Daniel Missler on a Newman 87 AI microphone using Hindenburg intro and outro. Music is by zombie with a Y, and to get the text and links from this episode, sign up for the newsletter version of the show at Daniel missler.com/newsletter. We'll see you next time.