UL NO. 438: Confusion is a Muse

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TOC

• NOTES

• MY WORK

• STORIES

• IDEAS

• DISCOVERY

• RECOMMENDATION OF THE WEEK

• APHORISM OF THE WEEK

NOTES

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• 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.

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 

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 

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 

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 

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 

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 

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IDEAS

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

—

Just don’t call it AI.

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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 

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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

Purchase: FANCY PANTS VERSION | NORMAL VERSION

APHORISM OF THE WEEK