- Unsupervised Learning
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- Unsupervised Learning NO. 471
Unsupervised Learning NO. 471
STANDARD EDITION: Cyber Standing Down, China's Innovation Burst, PC vs. NPC, Why AI Can't Understand, and more...
Daniel Miessler
March 04, 2025
Hey, hope your week’s going well,
Updates on my side…
Please allow me to publicly shame myself. I hack and write all day for work and then go out and eat—almost every single meal—at some fast food place. Eating in the car. I try to do it somewhat healthy, but there’s not really any such thing. I’m so tired of this. I must start cooking at home. Currently looking up steak recipes, and maybe one of those slow water cooker things. Send ideas or advice or encouragement. GIVE COOKING ADVICE
If you’re into Cloud Security at all you need to be following my buddy Rich Mogull’s Cloud Security Lab a Week (CloudSLAW). He’s one of the absolute best cloud security people on Earth, and he’s putting out super high quality labs for free. While being an EMT. Amazing people. LINK
MY WORK
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CYBERSECURITY
There’s a lot of confusion about the Trump administration supposedly standing down US cyber operations around Russia. Stories first say it’s government-wide, then we hear it’s only for offense. Then other agencies say things are still normal. I don’t like it at all, and I have lots to say about it below. LINK
VMware is releasing emergency patches for three actively exploited flaws in ESXi, Workstation, and Fusion that allow attackers to execute code and leak data. LINK
A new polyglot malware campaign called Sosano is targeting aviation and satellite companies in the UAE. Main tactic is putting malicious code within legitimate-looking PDF files. LINK
Hirsch IoT intercoms are letting anyone with Google access unlock apartment doors due to known default credentials. LINK
Brute-forcing attackers are targeting thousands of ISP networks in the U.S. and China to deploy stealers that grab crypto wallets and mine Monero on compromised systems. LINK
Meta terminated 20 employees for sharing internal info outside the company after recent stories about unannounced products and meetings. LINK
WIRED shows how Tesla vehicles record everything from driver behavior to biometric data, and asks some pretty smart privacy questions about the whole system. LINK | HACKER NEWS DISCUSSION | FABRIC ANALYSIS
NATIONAL SECURITY
China's research output on next-gen chipmaking tech is now double that of the US, suggesting the bans could be a forcing function to them becoming more naturally innovative. LINK
Tulsi Gabbard, the new Director of National Intelligence, is firing more than 100 intelligence officers for sharing “explicit” messages on an NSA internal platform, but I call Shenanigans. LINK
A number of my trans friends who know a lot about intelligence and cyber are saying this is 100% an attempt to remove trans people from government, and they’re using the “explicit” excuse to do so.
The messages in question seem to have been about getting “bottom surgery” and similar topics, kind of like women talking about post-pregnancy body issues or whatever. So it could be explicit, or personal, or gross or whatever in certain lights, but it’s part of being human.
So the question is—were those the right forums to talk about such things? I don’t know because I 1) didn’t see the messages, 2) don’t know the forum they were in, and most importantly, 3) don’t know if they were wasting all their time talking about personal issues instead of working, or if this was completely ok to be talking about in like a personal channel.
So there are a couple of options here:
There were a bunch of trans people ignoring their work and spending their time talking about personal trans issues in an inappropriate forum. So they got fired.
Tulsi Gabbard is part of an extremely anti-trans administration that is looking for any excuse to fire trans people. Even if it harms our ability to do intelligence work. So this is a cover for doing so.
I’m not close to the sources here so I can’t operate with any certainty, but given everything else the administration is known to be doing regarding trans people, I think #2 is far more likely.
TSMC is planning to invest $100 billion in US chip plants over the next four years, according to President Trump's announcement yesterday. Great to see. Get them all here. And Apple too. LINK
AI
Anthropic closed a $3.5 billion funding round that values the company at $61.5 billion. Its revenue has grown 1,000% year-over-year. Really feels like they’re quietly doing what OpenAI is loudly failing to do. This should be encouraging to companies that enter spaces that seem already won. There’s always space for someone to do it differently. LINK
OpenAI released GPT-4.5 "Orion", but most people aren’t happy with it. It’s quite expensive and doesn’t seem smarter at all. Felt to me like a rushed PR release because Sonnet 3.7 and other models had come out recently. LINK | OPENAI ANNOUNCEMENT
The Chinese government is telling its AI experts to avoid US travel because they’re worried they might leak Chinese secrets. Lol, irony. LINK
Roger Penrose explains why Gödel's theorem mathematically proves that artificial intelligence can't truly replicate human consciousness or understanding. I disagree, obviously, but I love steel-manning opposing viewpoints, and this looks very strong. LINK
Marc Benioff says Salesforce won't hire engineers in 2025 because their AI agents are doing the work so effectively. Sounds cool, but he’s selling an AI worker replacement technology, so this could just be marketing. LINK
A new study shows that large language models are just echoing logical patterns without real understanding, which explains why they struggle with complex reasoning. LINK
TECHNOLOGY
Waymo now handles over 200,000 paid robotaxi rides weekly across three cities, which is 20x growth in just two years. LINK
BYD and DJI have created a $2,200 vehicle-mounted drone launch platform that lets your EV deploy and retrieve drones while driving at speeds up to 15 mph. They also have a car that can do very small Knight Rider turbo boosts. Worried about them as a competitor for sure. LINK
HUMANS
The Housing Theory of Everything argues that our catastrophically restrictive housing policies create cascading problems across society, from inequality to climate change. LINK | HACKER NEWS DISCUSSION
Mani Doraisamy talks about how how solopreneurs are becoming real competition to traditional companies thanks to AI Coding. LINK | HACKER NEWS DISCUSSION
Top MBA programs are seeing way fewer grads landing jobs quickly, with Harvard's unemployment rate jumping from 4% to 15% since 2021. LINK
Researchers mapped porn titles from 2008-2023 and showed a disturbing migration in themes, from "Hot blonde gets f**ked" to increasingly incestuous and violent concepts like "I Can't Resist My Stepsis." LINK
The number of young people not in education, employment or training (Neet) has hit an 11-year high, and young men are affected far more than women. LINK
Solarpunk is a subgenre of sci-fi that imagines a sustainable future where humans and nature thrive together using renewable technology. I’ve been a fan ever since my favorite Chobani commercial. | WIKIPEDIA ARTICLE | HACKER NEWS DISCUSSION
Elon might go on Jon Stewart’s show and discuss DOGE. That would be a fun debate. LINK
RUSSIA IS WINNING
I don’t like any of this cozying up to Russia going on right now. I think it’s rotten.
I am actually happy about—and am surprised by—Trump’s desire to be friends with Xi and Putin. And to denuclearize. And to reduce all of our collective spending budgets. I think that’s all needed and great.
But Trump has to stop believing Putin when he tells him things. Like he’s so wanting to be this peacemaker (for his legacy) that he doesn’t realize he’s talking to the head of the fucking FSB/KGB. There’s a history here, and Putin would absolutely love to see the US fall. And he’s been working towards that for decades, including this last decade.
If Trump doesn’t see that, and he trusts Putin over our own intelligence people, and cyber people, and diminishes our capabilities to counter Russia as a result, then he’s unfit for the position. I don’t see him as compromised in the sense that he’s willingly trying to harm the United States in collusion with Russia. I think Trump is aggressively pro-US, and would never want to be known as someone who collaborated with Russia and brought down the United States. I think he’s extremely loyal and pa in that sense.
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