Unsupervised Learning NO. 470 (STANDARD EDITION)

Hey, hope your week’s going well,

Updates on my side…

• Reading a couple new books in addition to this month’s book club books. MONEY, LIES, and GOD | THE TECHNICAL REPUBLIC 

• I’ve got a friend in Guatemala who was recently laid off. He’s a Senior Engineer focused around monitoring solutions, but can pretty much do anything. HIS LINKEDIN 

• My friend Monica is offering 25% off on her Security Leadership Masterclass, which I consulted on and think is great for people trying to get into leadership. CLASS LINK | HER NEWSLETTER

• 🤣 How to calm down a buddy who loses a bunch in crypto. LINK

• My LinkedIn post about my Ultimate App (TM) I keep iterating on. LINK

• I’d subscribe to a newsletter that was just my DISCOVERY section. My new sources and parsing have seriously upgraded it. So happy with this.

MY WORK

👀 Highly-recommended successor to my SPQA article from 2023. This is basically the final form (not counting ASI) of what to actually do with this stuff.

CYBERSECURITY

A phenomenal analysis of the cybersecurity market in 2024 from my buddy Mike Privette at Return on Security. I call him the Nate Silver of Cybersecurity Market Analysis. He says cyber investments are getting back to something like normal with over $14B in funding, but with AI and private equity playing much bigger roles than before. LINK

- Total funding: $14B across 621 rounds in 112 product categories
- M&A: 271 transactions worth $45.7B across 59 product categories 
- US still dominated with $10.9B (83% of global funding)

A massive leak of Black Basta ransomware gang's internal chats has researchers working to translate and analyze over 500K Russian messages. LINK

Russian hackers are successfully compromising encrypted Signal messages from Ukrainian military by tricking them into scanning malicious QR codes. LINK

Apple dropped Advanced Data Protection in the UK after the government demanded access to encrypted user backups. The UK seems to be committed to being horrible right now. What does this actually do for people? Also I like the way Apple handled it. No, you can’t have a backdoor. LINK

You can trick ChatGPT's Operator feature into leaking private user data through prompt injection. LINK

Australia is joining the US in banning Kaspersky products from government systems due to concerns about foreign interference and data collection. What took them so long? LINK

Some researchers found they could consistently break prompt defenses by feeding models bizarre Indiana Jones-themed adventure stories. LINK | CMU RESEARCH PAPER

A new phishing-as-a-service platform called Darcula v3 has emerged that lets criminals clone any brand's website in under 10 minutes. LINK

A data leak from TopSec, a Chinese cybersecurity company, reveals they're offering censorship-as-a-service to help monitor and control public opinion in China. LINK 

OpenAI just banned a bunch of accounts using ChatGPT to help create a Chinese surveillance tool for tracking anti-China protests in the West. LINK

NATIONAL SECURITY

The head of Australia's intelligence agency is saying multiple foreign states have been plotting to murder dissidents on Australian soil. LINK

AI

🤩 Anthropic finally dropped their latest model, and it was a 2 point dot release of Sonnet. So it’s Sonnet 3.7.

The benchmark’s look completely insane, but you can’t really go by those. The question is what most AI builders are actually using. Even today—after many releases beyond Sonnet 3.5, the go-to for most is still Sonnet 3.5. So it’ll be interesting to see if the people who know stay locked on Sonnet with 3.7, or if something dethrones it.

I have been mostly using Sonnet 3.5 (it’s my default in Fabric)
I’ve now migrated to 3.7 with all my main tools
I sometimes using Gemini Flash for the 2 million tokens

The other thing being talked about with this release is Claude Code, which is a CLI-based coding agent. Basically does the same as Cursor or Cline or whatever, but all in the terminal. LINK

Google is getting rid of SMS 2FA codes for Gmail in favor of QR codes, to cut down on fraud and scams. LINK

Nathan Young wrote a wonderful letter to future artificial general intelligence about the importance of consciousness and the hope that AIs will understand and seek to develop it. LINK

Humane's AI Pin fell from the sky and hit the ground. Sad. I was signed up. These kinds of failures will also affect the ability for new companies to build this kind of hype, which I guess is a good thing. LINK

Elon has been talking non-stop about how Grok3 isn’t filtered, and it’s super smart, and how xAI’s mission is to pursue truth no matter what. Great goals, which I support him on. But tons of people are pointing out that he’s starting to filter/censor results that are critical of him. He can’t have it both ways. Either Grok3 is smart or he’s being called out for good reason. LINK

TECHNOLOGY

Software engineering job listings have fallen to a five-year low, with Indeed postings at just 65% of January 2020 levels—which is worse than any other tech-adjacent field. LINK

An interesting analysis of how PMs and Engineers are merging because of AI. This shouldn’t be surprising since the primitives here are 1) knowing what you want to build, 2) knowing why you want to build that vs. something else, and 3) pursuing that. LINK

Apple is putting half a trillion dollars into US tech manufacturing, with a huge focus on AI and chip production. LINK

Meta's Ray-Ban smart glasses are quietly crushing it with 2 million units sold, and they're making 10M per year by 2026. LINK

YouTube has officially beaten Spotify and Apple as the top source for podcasts. They now have over 1 billion people watching podcasts every month. LINK

Superhuman just announced a major AI-focused release that integrates AI super deeply into your email workflows. I got invited to early version, and it’s super sick. It auto-labels your emails to help with inbox spam. Also, it does AUTO DRAFTS! And AUTO FOLLOW-UPS. So if I asked someone for something, it’ll write a follow-up email and put it drafts for me to review and send! LINK

Alibaba's CEO Eddie Wu said they’re going all-in on AGI development as their primary focus. LINK

HUMANS

New research says despite saying intelligence matters more, both women and their parents overwhelmingly choose the more attractive guy when forced to pick. LINK

Tech executives are now attending "psychedelic slumber parties" where they use ketamine therapy to reset their minds and escape mental ruts LINK

Gallup says LGBTQ+ identification in the U.S. is now 9.3%, which is nearly triple what it was in 2012 when they started tracking it. LINK

Elon's now asking federal workers to list what they did last week or get fired, which—like many things with him—has me cheering and wincing. I love the efficiency push, and I think it’s how he’s able to innovate. But there’s such a thing as going too far. Especially when you’re not building net-new and instead possibly disrupting services that people need. LINK

The Bureau of Prisons is moving forward with plans to house trans inmates based on birth sex rather than gender identity. LINK

A heart doctor explains how swollen fingertips, leg edema, and changes in eye color can predict an impending heart attack. But my cardiologist buddy Jonathan says it’s important to know that just because you don’t have these signs, doesn’t mean you’re ok. LINK

A 27-year-old woman's viral post about "girlhood FOMO" reveals a widespread loneliness crisis among women in their 20s and 30s who feel they're missing out on close female friendships. LINK

Taylor Swift lost 144K Instagram followers after getting booed at the Super Bowl, while her boyfriend Travis Kelce actually gained followers. Someone show me the Algebra on that. LINK

A look at Edward Abbey's raw, honest writings about how to live fully and die on your own terms. LINK

A neuroscientist argues that extremely high IQs (like 160+) are basically fictional, and even Einstein probably scored around 120-130. This is interesting because I’ve thought a lot about this over the years, and the idea that over like 120 the benefits start to significantly reduce. It starts to become way more about the combination of that intelligence with drive, creativity, and most importantly—curiosity. That’s my view, anyway. And this guy’s analysis seems to rhyme, especially his last paragraph. LINK

A NASA-contracted lunar lander just beamed back some gorgeous shots of the Moon as it enters orbit for next week's landing attempt. LINK

MEMBER EDITION TEASER

This week’s DISCOVERY section has some absolute gems. Here’s a teaser to peak your curiosity.