Unsupervised Learning NO. 476

Hey, hope you’re doing well!,

Few things on my side…

• I ended up going with Shun Kaji knives, and I have them in a 360 Knife Block IMAGE

• The Midjourney v7 Image/Prompt combinations I promised. LINK | MORE IMAGES

• Have been running this 6-hour Brian Eno mix all week. LINK

CYBERSECURITY

Remote Access Backdoor Discovered in Chinese Robot Dog Unitree Go1
Security researchers Andreas Makris and Kevin Finisterre found that popular Chinese robodogs from Go1 come with a hidden backdoor allowing complete remote control without user knowledge. Just keep thinking about the Black Mirror robot dog episode. LINK | FULL REPORT

Microsoft April 2025 Patch Tuesday Fixes Exploited Zero-Day, 134 Flaws
Microsoft released its April 2025 security update package addressing 134 vulnerabilities, including 12 criticals, and a zero-day being actively exploited in the wild. LINK

CVSS 10.0 RCE Flaw Discovered in Widely Used Apache Parquet
A critical RCE vulnerability in all Apache Parquet versions up to 1.15.0 lets attackers execute code if you import a malicious parquet file. I don’t get how it’s still a 10.0 if you have to take such a specific action. LINK

Google Announces Sec-Gemini v1: A New Experimental Cybersecurity Model
Sec-Gemini — Google just released a cybersecurity-focused AI model that can analyze malware, reverse engineer code, and help defenders understand complex threats. They say it finds 78% more zero-day vulnerabilities in controlled tests than traditional automated scanning tools. LINK

CISA Warns of Fast Flux DNS Evasion Used by Cybercrime Gangs
CISA and other agencies are warning about "Fast Flux" DNS techniques that help threat actors rapidly switch IP addresses and servers to evade detection. My question is: did we just forget about this from like 10-15 years ago? LINK

Oracle Says Its Cloud Was In Fact Compromised
Oracle has quietly admitted to multiple customers that their cloud was actually hacked, and data was stolen, after initially denying any breach. LINK

Port Of Seattle Says Ransomware Breach Impacts 90,000 People
The Port of Seattle is notifying 90,000 people that their personal data was stolen in an August 2024 Rhysida ransomware attack that they refused to pay ransom for. LINK

Flaw in Verizon Call Record Requests put Millions of Americans at risk
Evan Connelly found a huge bug in Verizon's Call Filter app allowing anyone to request call logs for other users. LINK

NATIONAL SECURITY

Head of NSA and Cyber Command Is Ousted
General Paul M. Nakasone was abruptly removed from his leadership roles at the NSA and Cybercommand after serving for six years. LINK

Haugh Also Fired from Leadership of NSA, Cyber Command
President Trump abruptly fired Air Force Gen. Timothy Haugh from his positions leading both the NSA and Cyber Command, just a year into his traditional three-year term. LINK

AI

The New Llama 4 Models, and my Daily Drivers
I’ve been using the new Llama 4 model (Scout) on Groq, and the performance is extremely impressive. Not just the speed, which comes from Groq, but the intelligence of the model. Although there is some controversy saying they may have gamed the benchmarks.

Craziest thing is if get Scout fully running, it’s got a 10 Million Token context window!

I’m still mostly a Sonnet 3.7 person though, with o-1 Pro being my Thinking go-to.

I also use XAI’s Grok for research, and find it to be consistently great.

I’m surprised Llama4 isn’t on Ollama.com yet. Probably soon.

LINK 

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ElevenLabs Published an MCP Server
You can use their MCP server to do things like building agents that can make outbound calls for you using custom voices. LINK

AI is Creating Rifts at McKinsey, Bain, and BCG
Top consulting firms are pushing AI adoption while their junior consultants are pushing back, saying management is pushing unrealistic deadlines due to thinking AI is a magic bullet. LINK

Gemini 2.5 Pro Is Now Available Without Limits And For Cheaper Than Claude, GPT-4o
I’ve been using this one a lot as well. I’ve had some API call failures though, so have switched back to Sonnet 3.7 temporarily. I love how quiet and quality Google is in this game. OpenAI is loud, Anthropic is flashy too, and Google just ships. LINK

Midjourney v7 Launches With Voice Prompting And Faster Draft Mode
Midjourney's new v7 model is way better in my testing. It also requires that you personalize it, which I’ve done with more than 300 images already. LINK | MY EXAMPLES

Don't Believe Reasoning Models' Chains of Thought, Says Anthropic
Anthropic found that AI models like Claude 3.7 Sonnet and DeepSeek-R1 frequently hide when they use hints to answer questions, calling into question the reliability of their reasoning explanations. LINK

The Slow Collapse of Critical Thinking in OSINT Due to AI
Dutch OSINT Guy explains how over-reliance on AI tools is eroding the critical thinking skills that make OSINT work truly valuable and reliable. LINK

Senior Developer Skills in the AI Age
Manuel Kiessling says experienced developers are uniquely positioned to leverage AI coding tools due to their architectural expertise and development fundamentals. LINK

TECHNOLOGY

Amazon's New 'Buy for Me' Feature Is a Unique AI Innovation
Amazon's testing a novel new "Buy for me" feature that uses agentic AI to purchase products from other retailers without you ever leaving the Amazon app. LINK

Apple Might Import More iPhones From India To Dodge China Tariffs
Apple is considering importing more Indian-made iPhones to avoid Trump's newly announced 54% tariffs on Chinese imports. LINK

Microsoft Employee Disrupts 50th Anniversary and Calls AI Boss 'War Profiteer'
A Microsoft software engineer dramatically interrupted the company's 50th celebration to accuse AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman of profiting from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. LINK

Hyundai to Buy 'Thousands' of Boston Dynamics Robots
Hyundai is planning to purchase tens of thousands of robots from Boston Dynamics, which they plan to use throughout the business. LINK

Intel and TSMC are reportedly launching a joint chipmaking venture
Intel and TSMC have tentatively agreed to form a joint venture where TSMC will take a 20% stake and train Intel employees on advanced chipmaking practices. LINK

The Machines Are Rising — But Developers Still Hold The Keys
An argument (that I agree with) that developer judgment is becoming more crucial, not less, for building and maintaining quality software systems. LINK

Jason Snell's M4 MacBook Air Review
He says it’s basically the perfect Mac for most people. I just replaced my downstairs iPad with this thing (base model). Turns out I don’t like iPads as computers, only as drawing tools. LINK

HUMANS

One Third of Americans Work in STEMM Jobs Accounting for 39% of GDP, According to Economic Impact Study
This is one of the main reasons I’m worried about AGI-capable agents coming to market in (my guess) 2026—2027. The study shows that over 73.6 million Americans now work in STEMM fields, representing 34% of the workforce and contributing nearly 40% to the national GDP. LINK

Five Nurses who work on the same floor at hospital have brain tumors
Five nurses working on a Boston-area hospital's maternity floor have developed benign brain tumors, but officials claim they found no environmental risks linked to the cases. LINK

New antibiotic that kills drug-resistant bacteria found in technician's garden
Scientists discovered a powerful new antibiotic compound in a lab technician's backyard soil sample that successfully combats drug-resistant bacteria. LINK

The ADHD Body Double: A Unique Tool for Getting Things Done
Body doubling—just having someone sit quietly nearby while you work—can dramatically help people with ADHD stay focused and accomplish tasks they'd otherwise struggle with. Wonder why this is… LINK

Purple Exists Only in Our Brains
Science journalist Beth Geiger explains that purple isn't actually in the visible light spectrum—our brains create it when confused by simultaneous red and blue wavelengths. Perhaps my favorite non-color. LINK

Costco Only Accepts Visa Credit Cards
John Gruber points out that while most retailers accept both Visa and Mastercard, Costco stores only take Visa as part of their exclusive credit card deal. LINK

DISCOVERY

Trafficking-Free Tomorrow
A nonprofit run by Brooke Deuson that builds free, open-source, and offline-capable software (Folsum) to help investigators working human trafficking cases around the world. LINK | THE SOFTWARE | GITHUB

I Don't Like Traveling Anymore
Sid Verma confesses that traveling has become more stressful than enjoyable now that he's older, with responsibilities, and just wants to be home. LINK

You Don't Have Time Not To Test
Doug Donohoe argues that testing actually saves time by catching bugs early, preventing future headaches, and making code safer to refactor. LINK

Creativity Fundamentally Comes From Memorization
Ashwin Matthews argues that creativity isn't magical inspiration but rather connecting deeply internalized patterns after you've mastered the fundamentals of your domain. So basically memorization isn’t bad learning, it’s necessary learning. LINK

Ilya Describes Why Modern AI DOES Understand Things
Ilya explains how/why AI’s actually understand, and he does it so crisply. LINK

Jack Dorsey on Attention to Minimized Details
Make every detail perfect, and minimize their number. Super elegant. LINK

AWS MCP Servers
AWS Labs released MCP servers for cost analysis, CDK help, image generation, and more. LINK

The Best Programmers I Know
Matthias Endler shares the key traits he's noticed in the most exceptional programmers he knows. Really solid list. LINK

Why I Don't Discuss Politics With Friends
Ashwin Matthews explains why avoiding political conversations with friends helps preserve valued relationships while social media actually pushes us toward political extremes. LINK

Crystal, a Tool for Researching Government Data via Plain English
Crystal — A new alpha-stage tool that lets you search and analyze over 300,000 government datasets using natural language. LINK

Largest Open Source MCP Repo
Activepieces — Open source Zapier alternative now offers 280 integrations as Model Control Protocol servers so your LLMs can directly interact with your favorite tools. So many of these popping up now. LINK

Generate llms.txt Files for AI-Friendly Websites
llms-txt.io – A new tool that helps website owners tell AI systems which parts of their site can be used for training and which should be left alone. This should be integrated into robots.txt, though, IMO. LINK

A 6-Hour Time-Stretched Version of Brian Eno's Music for Airports
Someone has time-stretched Brian Eno's ambient masterpiece "Music for Airports" into a gorgeous six-hour experience perfect for deep work or meditation. LINK

The Secrets Of James Hoffman’s Coffee Routine
James Hoffmann walks through his daily coffee routine that's evolved to maximize both quality and convenience. Super practical. 🤣 LINK