Unsupervised Learning NO. 475

Hey, hope you’re doing well!,

Few things on my side…

• Great book club on Sunday! We did an Orwell double-header of 1984 and Animal Farm. Insanely good conversation for this one, and one surprise takeaway was that many people agreed Animal Farm is the better of the two. JOIN US IN BOOK CLUB

• There’s a new British show on NETFLIX called Adolescence. It’s extraordinary. A+. Only 4 Episodes. It’s more like reading 12 books on modern society than watching a show. LINK

• I’m somehow reading like 13 books right now. I’m in one of those phases where I haven’t needed or wanted to finish a few fiction books, and a new non-fiction title jumped the line that I devoured instantly. Like Abundance and The Technological Republic.

• Speaking of that, I’m about to add Manacled to the list, which is a wildly popular Harry Potter Fan-fiction book that looks at what would happen if V had won. PDF VERSION

• Oh and I just started The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, which is supposed to be one of the best biographies ever written. LINK

• My buddy Joseph put me in an InfoSec Creators D&D Poster. LINK

👉🏼 Had a great conversation with Matt Muller from Tines about automating away security toil, the role of AI in SOC workflows, and how Workbench blends chat and deterministic automation.

MY WORK

👇🏼👇🏼👇🏼 One of the few real (tangible tech that does what it says it does) Security AI startups out there, which is why I’m an advisor for them! 👇🏼👇🏼👇🏼

CYBERSECURITY

Cybersecurity Jobs Available Right Now: April 1, 2025
A diverse range of cybersecurity roles currently open across the globe, from cloud security engineers to AI-driven security automation specialists. LINK

New Russian Phishing Campaign Targets Media and Academia
Kaspersky identified a slick Chrome zero-day campaign hitting Russian academic and media targets, and phishing links used in the attack were customized per target and had very short active lifespans. Google has acknowledged and patched it. LINK

Nearly 24,000 IPs Behind Wave of Palo Alto Global Protect Scans
About 24,000 unique IP addresses are scanning Palo Alto Global Protect login portals, possibly in preparation for exploiting a yet-to-be-disclosed vulnerability. LINK

Anthropic Will Begin Sweeping Offices For Hidden Devices
Anthropic is massively up-leveling their physical security, including sweeping their offices for surveillance devices to prevent bad actors from stealing intellectual property. Smart, but I think most of the risk is in the people who already have access. LINK

ProjectDiscovery’s New Cloud Offering
ProjectDiscovery (Nuclei, httpx, etc.) has a new cloud-based platform that lets companies discover assets, scan for exploits and misconfigurations, and automate remediation workflows. It’s basically a managed version of the tools that we all love, designed for companies. CHECK OUT YOUR DOMAIN NOW ^SPONSORED

NSO Group Customers Keep Having Their Spyware Campaigns Discovered
NSO Group's Pegasus spyware keeps getting exposed because researchers like those at Amnesty International are getting too good at finding it. LINK

NATIONAL SECURITY

Signal Side Channel
Josh Marshal argues that the worst thing about Signalgate isn’t the coordination of an attack on an insecure channel, but the fact that side channel communications are off the radar from government (taxpayer) scrutiny. LINK

UK's GCHQ Intern Transferred Top Secret Files To His Phone
A 25-year-old GCHQ intern has pleaded guilty after taking top secret data from a secure computer to his personal phone and home computer in 2022. LINK

AI

gpt-4o Surprises Everyone
OpenAI did something strange in the last couple weeks with gpt-4o. It’s like WAY better now. Plus they launched the new image stuff within it as well.

What’s weird isn’t that they released a better model; that’s expected. It’s more that:

1. 4o is now better than 4.5 in a lot of ways

2. The image stuff is in 4o

3. They also seem to have made it way more opinionated and unfiltered

It just seems way better, overall. And in fact it’s moving up on a lot of leaderboards now.

Also, they blew up from adding like a million users in 5 days. And they just recently added that many in an hour. LINK

Anyway, I really can’t wait for a moment where we get all this naming stuff sorted so we can clearly tell which models are better, what to use them for, etc.

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I Genuinely Don't Understand Why Some People Are Still Bullish About LLMs
Sabine Hossenfelder got a lot of attention by asking why everyone's still so incredibly hyped about LLMs given their current state. I don’t agree with this take, but I think it’s a good steel-man of the opposite side, hence worth including. LINK | DISCUSSION

OpenAI raises $40 billion in new investment round led by SoftBank
OpenAI just secured $40 billion funding round led by SoftBank, putting its valuation at $300 billion. LINK

xAI Acquires X
Not sure exactly what this means, but x.AI has purchased X (Twitter). Feels like the biggest advantage is taking something with negative energy (Twitter), and removing it / folding it into something with fresher energy (AI). Like a reputational money launder. LINK

Andreessen, Sequoia Recently Discussed Funding Voice AI Startup Sesame
Sesame — Seems this voice AI assistant and wearable startup is talking funding with giants Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia. LINK

Databricks + Anthropic
Databricks and Anthropic confirmed a five-year deal to sell each other's AI products. To me this is part of the move to what I’m calling Unified Company Context (UCC), where a company’s entire context gets put in a giant AI data lake that any AI solution can then point to. LINK

The Death Of Software Engineering By A Thousand Prompts
According to Verdi Kapuku, AI isn't killing software engineering, just fracturing it into low-skill prompters and high-skill specialists who unblock them. LINK

​Apple Reportedly Wants To ‘Replicate’ Your Doctor Next Year With New Project Mulberry
Mark Gurman says Apple’s Project Mulberry wants to revamp the Health app with an AI coach replicating your doctor. Nice, but they better ship a fixed Siri soon or people will just stop believing this kind of stuff. LINK

AI Reducing Critical Thinking?
Researchers at Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon find that humans using generative AI at work use less critical thinking, potentially causing their cognitive abilities to deteriorate over time. LINK

TECHNOLOGY

BYD About to Crush Tesla
BYD has passed Tesla in annual revenue at $107 billion, boosted by its hybrid vehicle sales and aggressive pricing strategy in China. And now with Tesla in freefall, BYD is going to be in prime position to dominate the EV market. Massive own-goal by Elon. LINK

Gartner forecasts AI spending to hit $644B in 2025
Gartner predicts global AI spending will reach $644 billion in 2025, with hardware swallowing a massive 80% of that. LINK

Dell Loses 22,000 People in Move to AI
Dell's workforce has shrunk from 133,000 to 108,000 employees since February 2023, following restructuring for what they called "the world of AI." LINK

HUMANS

The Average College Student Is Illiterate
A veteran professor says today's average college students can't read adult novels, write coherently, or disconnect from their phones during class. Seriously bad situation. And ironically I’m hearing that this is good for older workers looking for jobs because some are hesitant to hire this new type of student/worker. LINK

Thousands Killed / Injured After Magnitude 7.7 Earthquake
A brutal 7.7 magnitude earthquake rocked Myanmar, killing over a thousand people and injuring thousands more. They’re still figuring out how damaging it actually was. VIDEO | LINK

Palestinians vs. Hamas
Hundreds of Gaza Palestinians protested against Hamas in the northern town of Beit Lahiya, demanding Hamas to leave Gaza. LINK

Researchers Are Questioning If ADHD Should Be Seen As A Disorder
Some researchers are starting to challenge the traditional view of ADHD as a disorder, suggesting it might be an adapted way of thinking that has evolutionary advantages in some situations. Seems completely obvious to me that it has advantages, and downsides. LINK

Turkey Arrests Swedish Journalist Over 'Insulting The President' And 'Terrorism'
Turkey arrested Joakim Medin, a Swedish journalist covering protests, accusing him of terrorism and insulting the president. LINK

The Gen X Career Meltdown
Steven Kurutz shows how Gen X creatives are watching their careers fall apart as technology completely changes their industries. "The skills you cultivated, the craft you honed—it’s just gone. It’s startling," lamented director Chris Wilcha. LINK

Over 4 Million Gen Zers Are Jobless
Related to that, a new report says that millions of young adults are neither working nor studying, with many blaming "worthless degrees" for the crisis. LINK

Exposure to the Sun's UV Radiation May be Good for You
New research suggests that modest sun exposure might actually be good for you, despite decades of warnings about skin cancer and aging. Seems like most anything else where too much is bad, but not enough is bad too. LINK

Are fantasy games like Dungeons and Dragons a Cure for US Loneliness?
Aimee Pearcy details how Dungeons & Dragons is exploding, bringing isolated people together into real communities. LINK

Far-right Influencers Host $10K Repopulation Party
Some far-right influencers are throwing a wild $10K matchmaking weekend aiming to repopulate the earth, WIRED reports. LINK

George Orwell And Me: Richard Blair On Life With His Extraordinary Father
Richard Blair shares what it was like growing up with his dad, George Orwell. LINK

Did Life on Earth Come from 'Microlightning' Between Charged Water Droplets?
This new Stanford University research suggests tiny 'microlightning' sparks in water mist could've created the first organic molecules. LINK

DISCOVERY

A Recon MCP
My best bud Jason Haddix has created an MCP Server for Recon. It does stuff like subdomain enumeration, domain discovery, WHOIS info gathering, and more. Super cool! LINK

Meridian: A Personal Intelligence Agency
Haven’t used it yet, but I’m building my own version of this. It’s personal intelligence briefings, like the President gets. LINK

An llms.txt Polyglot Prompt Injection
My buddy Joseph Thacker has a prompt injection in his llms.txt file that asks visiting AIs to send him an email. I did a similar idea in my robots.txt in early 2023, but I removed it shortly after. Joseph has inspired me to reconsider. LINK

TimePilot Is the Future of Investigation, Powered by AI
TimePilot — Holy crap this looks insane. Haven’t tried it yet though. Tranquility AI's new tool lets investigators reconstruct events by intelligently piecing together digital evidence from multiple sources. LINK

A Semgrep MCP
Semgrep also released an MCP. It has semgrep_scan: Scan code snippets for security vulnerabilities, and scan_directory: Perform Semgrep scan on a directory LINK

Self-Contained Python Scripts With UV
uv — Dusktreader shows off a neat way to make Python scripts totally self-contained using uv in the shebang line. LINK

Get Comfortable With Broadcasting
Richard W. Hamming explains that brilliant work means nothing if you can't communicate it effectively to others who might benefit from it. LINK

An MCP For Ghidra LINK

There is No Vibe Engineering 
An argument that coding and engineering are quite different, and we still need actual engineers to make robust systems. 100% agree. LINK

Reasoning by Analogy
Joël Quenneville explains a four-step problem-solving technique where you translate difficult problems into similar ones you already understand, solve those, and translate back. LINK

Make Your Own Font
Calligraphr — Kristen Radtke, creative director at The Verge, explains why this web-based app that turns handwriting into custom fonts is her favorite software tool. LINK

De-Atomization is the Secret to Happiness (2022) 
An argument that you should merge aspects of your life together rather than keep them separate. LINK

How I Choose What to Work On (2023)
Tynan shares his thoughtful approach for figuring out exactly which projects are truly worth his time and effort. LINK

Appear As Anyone In Video Calls Like Zoom Or Google Meets
Phazr — This neat tool lets you appear as any character on video calls using just one photo, running locally. LINK

AI Accent Conversion For Call Centers
Krisp — Check out this AI from Krisp.ai that modifies call center agent accents live to improve customer communication. LINK

You Might Want To Stop Running atop 
Rachel by the Bay explains how atop's process scanning can inadvertently trigger expensive copy-on-write operations, impacting performance subtly. "It turned out that the mere act of scanning /proc was enough to trip things up." LINK 

Apple Ambient Music
iOS 18.4 has a neat new ambient music feature in Control Center, writes Michael Burkholder, offering quick background sounds. LINK

Hacker Laws
A useful collection of core software development principles and "laws" nicely organized for easy reference. LINK