UPDATES
Hey! Hope you all are doing well!
RSA - I’m doin a mini-con / set of lightning talks (Unsupervised + Unhinged) with Clint Gibler and Decibel. It’s Wednesday, March 25 10AM - Noon. You can register for the Decibel stuff here. Hope to see you there!
—
SURFACE UPDATES & IMPROVEMENTS!
The View Selector in Surface
Ok got some great feedback on the Surface launch post last week. Basically a few show-stoppers for some people that we’ve already addressed.
I don’t like Google Auth, can we auth by email? FIXED!
I need to be able to pay monthly instead of for a full year. FIXED!
Can we show which currency it is? FIXED!
Plus we’re now up to around 4,800 sources, and we’ve added tons in a new SIGINT category, as well as a new Predictions category. Also, don’t forget members get another 25% off with the code in UL chat!
This is honestly so good that I am not using Feedly anymore. With Threshold I used both. With this, RSS/Feedly feels ancient. Not joking, not hyping. This is my actual usage.
—
—
I’m starting to think drones are about to become a much bigger part of our lives than we think. A few stories in this newsletter, but way more in the larger news, are pointing towards Kamikaze attacks used by different types of groups. Military, obviously, but now also gangs. So the question is how long is it before it’s like an executive protection issue? A home defense issue. A personal safety issue. Basically, public safety. You know like Octoberfest and Christmas markets where people drive their cars into crowds? What happens when they can spend $5K and drop explosive drones on crowds? Not trying to create a panic; there’s not even a threat right now. Just something to start thinking about, unfortunately.
—
Don’t forget that DISCOVERY is full of gems. The regular sections are mostly news-like, so if something is more like a find or idea it’ll be in IDEAS or DISCOVERY!
Sponsor
Remediation your developers will love
Security finds the most critical vulnerability. Developers get asked to fix it, but it still feels like a research project. So the ticket sits. Sound familiar?
Maze remediation agents think like your developers do. They trace root cause, deliver fixes that fit your environment, and verify the fix works. Multiple options, so you always have a way forward. No sitting tickets.
CYBERSECURITY
Stryker's surgical tools work fine but their ordering systems are still down While the actual medical devices are safe, doctors still can't order new equipment through their digital systems. STRYKER CYBERATTACK REPORT
Attackers are quietly hijacking AI agents via booby-trapped webpages. Prompt Injection is not going away as a problem. Sam Altman said we’ll need a breakthrough in CompSci to be able to actually solve it, and I think I agree. SECURITYONLINE REPORT
Stop treating prompt injection like SQL injection; it needs different defenses. NCSC BLOG POST
Claude Opus surfaced 22 Firefox bugs; fixes landed in 148. SECURITYAFFAIRS ARTICLE
Sponsor
Stop Burning Your Team Out
The hardest part of modern security isn’t lack of tooling; it’s asking people to do machine-scale work at human bandwidth.
Alert budgets, tiered SOCs, nonstop on-call mask the scale mismatch, creating noise, context switching, fatigue, and burnout. Cotool moves detection, investigation, and response into agents.
Teams set guardrails; the system executes, so operations scale without constant human intervention.
OpenClaw AI agents are booming in China despite government bans. TOMSHARDWARE ARTICLE
Centralized “control citadel” for supervising autonomous agents. SONDERA BLOG POST
Anthropic’s attack-agent security blueprint needs your attention. SONDERA BLOG POST
Deterministic safety firewall for AI agents, sub-millisecond rule checks. Thought this was an interesting idea. GITHUB REPOSITORY
NATIONAL SECURITY
Record IEA oil release as markets wobble. QZ ARTICLE
US officials say escort mission in Hormuz may take weeks [ARTICLE]
Chevron leader secretly briefed CIA on Venezuela’s inner workings. WALL STREET JOURNAL ARTICLE
Rampant front-line drug use is reshaping battlefield behavior. AL JAZEERA REPORT
Zelensky links Russian-supplied Shahed drones to US base attacks. This is how things escalate: with Russia or China starting to help. THE HILL ARTICLE
China’s new security era in Africa: protecting assets, citizens from DR Congo to Somalia SCMP REPORT
AI
Learning flywheels, not IQ, drive the next AI jump The author argues human progress exploded once we built learning flywheels like writing and science, and LLMs now have similar self-improvement loops that could trigger a sudden capability surge. LEARNING FLYWHEELS ARE ALL YOU NEED | INVERTED PASSION HOMEPAGE
China is building AI for its core mission: the US more for a fuzzy risk-reduction. LOWY INTERPRETER ARTICLE
AI won’t replace engineers; it’ll widen the gap. WHY DO THEY WANT TO GET RID OF SOFTWARE ENGINEERS?
AI blame hides brittle processes that were already failing. ARTICLE
TECHNOLOGY
YouTube passes Disney on media revenue, driven by ads, subs, and AI. HOLLYWOOD REPORTER ARTICLE
Living neurons learn to play Doom on a chip. DOOM DEMO BY CORTICAL LABS
Native lost its edge, so Electron won by default. CLAUDE ELECTRON ESSAY
Why Postgres has won for agentic AI INFOWORLD ARTICLE
HUMANS
Universal college expectations created a permanent, self-inflicted education crisis. SUBSTACK ESSAY
UBI as a productivity dividend Scott Santens argues UBI is the rightful dividend from rising productivity, showing how automation decouples income from work and proposing cash floors so people can choose better work. UNIVERSAL BASIC INCOME IS YOUR PRODUCTIVITY DIVIDEND
Beijing is codifying ethnic assimilation across Tibet and other minorities. THE DIPLOMAT ARTICLE
How to keep creative depth after depression without clinging to darkness. THE GUARDIAN COLUMN
Connected notes make blogs smarter and longer-lasting. REVIEW
IDEAS
It’s the People, Not the Politicians
The problem with our (US) politics is not politicians. It’s the people. Realizing this is extremely liberating, calming, and depressing at the same time.
Why I don't destroy snowmen WHY I DON'T DESTROY SNOWMEN
The Bitter Lesson Has No Utility Function THE BITTER LESSON HAS NO UTILITY FUNCTION
DISCOVERY
Inside the mind of a top superforecaster This piece profiles Malcolm Murray, a Good Judgment superforecaster, and shows how he structures questions, updates probabilities, and uses base rates to beat intuition. MEET SUPERFORECASTER MALCOLM MURRAY
AI should flow through pipes, not platforms. UNIX MANIFESTO
The Gervais Principle explains workplace power dynamics through “The Office.” RIBBONFARM ESSAY
Dostoyevsky’s dream makes life’s meaning startlingly practical. THE DAY DOSTOYEVSKY DISCOVERED MEANING
Automate apps from the terminal with CLI Anything. GITHUB REPOSITORY
Stop optimizing for Google; build for humans and diversify traffic. ESSAY
Hacker News dataset released for researchers and builders. HACKER NEWS DATASET
Engineer’s blog triggers hostile “behavioral” interview grilling. BETRAYED BY MY OWN BLOG
Strait of Hormuz vulnerabilities mapped through engineering, not geopolitics. HACKER NEWS DISCUSSION
Read widely, not deeply READ WIDELY, NOT DEEPLY
OSINT as a mindset, not a toolbox. MEDIUM ARTICLE
Argus monitors GitHub repos for changes with pattern-based alerts. GITHUB REPOSITORY
Relativity, AI feeds, and moral simultaneity—one essay-length gut punch. THE RELATIVITY OF LIFE
Show HN: 2D RPG base game client recreated in modern HTML5 game engine with AI GITHUB REPOSITORY
RECOMMENDATION OF THE WEEK
I think Ikigai is a great way of capturing what I’ve been talking about as the future of personal productivity and careers. It’s the combination of what you love, what the world needs, what you can be paid for, and what you’re good at.
That’s it.
That’s a much better human-based future than finding some skill that corporations need, and spending decades doing that regardless of how much you like it.
So then it just becomes about:
figuring out what these are for you
doing my other recommendations of writing, blog, YouTube, etc. to get yourself out there
Those are the implementation given the current world of tech, but the concept is very old, and very healthy.
APHORISM OF THE WEEK
Happiness is being recognized for doing extraordinary work on something that’s bigger than yourself.
GET THE MEMBER EDITION
You’re currently receiving the STANDARD edition.
Members help this work continue. If you enjoy the newsletter, the podcast, what I put on YouTube, or any of my open-source projects on Github, I ask you to please become a member. It allows me to stay focused on learning and building and sharing. It’s like a cup of coffee or two per month.
Plus, members get numerous benefits, including:
25-50% off all UL Paid Content, including the upcoming Human 3.0 / AUGMENTED ONLINE portal!
Access to the extraordinary UL Member Community that includes vibrant conversations with ~1,500 of the smartest and kindest people you’ll find on the internet
Member-only Content, such as EDC guides on tech stacks, personal productivity routines, my recommendations on Critical skills to Build Going Forward, Trend Identification and Analysis, and more…
Access to the Member Archive of previous Member-only content, the Book Club archive, etc.
Access to The UL Book Club that’s been going monthly since 2017! One of the highlights of my and many attendees’ month!
Access to the Monthly Member Meet-up where we talk about our routines, productivity workflows, what’s on our minds, etc.
Access to In-Person Events like our dinners in Vegas, San Francisco, etc.
And much more coming…
This is the moment to connect with others who are smart, kind, and asking the same questions we are. Where is this all going? And how do to prepare?
Join the conversation.