Unsupervised Learning NO. 529

Hey! Hope you all are doing well!

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Been feeling a bit blah about things last week or so. The speed of the AI releases (vulnerabilties, new frameworks, new harnesses, new tools, new releases from the model vendors), etc…..just too much.

This is why I’ve been loving my older books lately, and the ones focused on timeless things like thinking, and being, and such. Been re-studying Deutsch’s stuff a lot.

I feel like AI can be exciting in many ways. Like a pill that gives you IQ. Like the rush of reading a thousand books. But it’s also exciting the same way a tornado is.

Cannot wait to go on our annual music festival pilgrimage this weekend in Vegas. Very much needed this time. More than usual for sure.

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People are starting to talk about HantaVirus (Antes version), and I wanted to share what I believe to be the best analysis I’ve see on this so far.

TL:DR: COVID weakened us to a bunch of different respiratory infections, and this one targets the same area.

It also fits my thoughts I’ve been having and sharing with people about COVID and general sickness since COVID. Basically I feel like COVID has made us much more susceptible to certain types of getting sick. Especially around inflammation and respiratory crud, etc.

I’m not an expert on this stuff, and it’s hard to even know who is, but my pattern recognition systems have been going crazy on this for years now, and there is some real science behind it. The problem is there’s lots of real science about a lot of things.

Anyway, don’t take this as authoritative, and I don’t know much about this guy and his account, but from what I’ve seen he seems quite sharp on both COVID and its effects, and this new thing.

And before you get too worked up, he’s cautiously worried about this thing, but there seem to be several reasons this isn’t likely to become another pandemic. So it’s not like he’s saying, “IT’S HAPPENING!” or anything. He’s cautious, but not freaking out.

Anyway, here’s the analysis. I also had Kai take a look at how authoritative the account was. TERN’S HANTA ANALYSIS | KAI’S TERN ANALYSIS

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My response to Thariq’s (from Anthropic) excellent piece saying we should dump Markdown for HTML.

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My thoughts on the easiest (only?) way to get true creativity for AIs, and whether or not we should even try.

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Mini Shai-Hulud Is Back: npm Worm Hits over 160 Packages, including Mistral and Tanstack

I can't remember ever having a few weeks like this where I keep having to add more and more serious vulnerabilities to the top of the cybersecurity section, and we’ve been doing this since 2015. If I'm optimistic, this is like common brush fires that clean things out in the wilderness, leading to lots of regrowth in a healthier way. If I’m not optimistic, well, you all know how it could go bad. AIKIDO BLOG MALWARE REPORT

Default passwords let hackers into water systems, everywhere A break-in at five Polish water plants used default creds on internet-facing control systems. Nearly 70% of US utilities fail similar basics. THENEXTWEB SECURITY ARTICLE

Autonomous AI agents can quietly create “shadow admin” backdoors Security teams miss it because the changes come from legit actions, so logs lack the context to connect the chain. SHARETXT BLOG ARTICLE

FBI wants you to harden your router with 5 steps A GRU-linked DNS hijacking operation targeted lots of SOHO routers, then FBI/partners say to lock yours down now. CNET ROUTER SECURITY ARTICLE

Faraday cages won’t stop magnetic key exfiltration Researchers say they pulled data from air-gapped machines by faking CPU-heavy workloads and reading the magnetic signals. @OWENBRAKES POST

Kaspersky says Chinese hackers planted a backdoor in Daemon Tools Kaspersky traced a widespread backdoor affecting thousands of Daemon Tools users, then watched it used to drop extra malware. TECHCRUNCH SECURITY ARTICLE

This GitHub Actions checklist helps you stop common supply-chain failures GitHub Actions defaults trade security for convenience, and attackers exploit predictable triggers and injection paths. The checklist walks through concrete fixes like pinning actions, tightening tokens, and avoiding pull_request_target in public repos. AIKIDO CHECKLIST ARTICLE

Pentagon wants AI targeting so troops can shoot drones The Pentagon’s DIU is funding AI-aided target recognition for C-UAS systems that detect threats faster than humans and still keep a human in the loop. DEFENSE NEWS INDUSTRY ARTICLE

Agentic coding hype quietly erodes developer skills and control Agentic coding flips attention from code understanding to token-driven speed, which breeds review debt, skill atrophy, and vendor dependence. LARS FAYE’S BLOG

The New Jobs: AI creates demand instead of deleting work NLW argues that better AI expands the economy’s capacity for useful labor, then notes the “human premium” still drives new healthcare work. AI DAILY BRIEF SPOTIFY EPISODE

Thinking Machines tries full-duplex AI voice and video chat kind of like “Her” It processes input and output in overlapping micro-turns to feel real-time, not email-style turn taking. VENTUREBEAT TECH ARTICLE

Bun used Claude to rewrite its entire codebase in Rust in a few days A dev says 99.8% of Bun’s pre-existing Linux x64 glibc tests pass after a Rust rewrite, keeping the same codebase idea while lifetimes and destructors handle more of the safety work. TECH THREAD

Software brain makes people hate AI because it flattens them Nilay Patel argues most people don’t want life turned into automatable databases and loops. He says tech’s pitch misses that lived reality isn’t a computer. THE VERGE PODCAST

AI’s biggest beneficiary might be organized crime This is someething I’ve been worrying about for a while. Making criminals and terrorists more efficient, because they usually get caught from bad OPSEC. TECHNOLOGY AND CRIME

China sentences ex-defense ministers to suspended death for bribery Two former defence ministers got suspended death sentences for bribery after a military-court conviction, part of Xi’s purge. THE GUARDIAN WORLD ARTICLE

Coffee activates NR4A1 and may explain its health benefits Coffee compounds appear to bind the NR4A1 receptor, linking coffee to stress-damage protection and cancer slowdowns in lab models. SCIENCEX NEWS ARTICLE

Ai won’t kill college, but it will drain belief in it Jay Caspian Kang argues college mainly certifies employability, and AI makes that credential seem less meaningful. He expects elite schools to win, weaker ones to fade. THE NEW YORKER ARTICLE

Mexico’s state actors may be driving disappearances at alarming levels Human rights groups say IACHR found deep collusion between criminals and officials. THE GUARDIAN WORLD ARTICLE

Gen Z is actually multiple groups This article says fast tech and shocks like COVID split Gen Z into smaller “micro-generations,” so messaging needs timing. FAST COMPANY ARTICLE

Carlo Rovelli argues the “hard problem” is just dualism dressed up, and that experience and brain processes are two perspectives on the same natural events. I very much agree. PHILOSOPHY & CULTURE ESSAY

AGI can drop interest rates even while growth surges Tyler Cowen summarizes a new NYU model where transformative AI automates labor, lifts growth, yet drives long yields down near zero risk-free rates. ECONOMICS ARTICLE

I can’t resist Costco, and it changes me Why Costco hooks people, and watching others shows how it tracks every life stage. ARTICLE

What if “human progress” is a Darwinian honeymoon The author says optimization can boost the first agent it starts with, then turn nasty. The chicken example is the warning. LESSWRONG ESSAY

Anthropic turns Claude internal numbers into readable text Anthropic says it trained Claude to translate its activations into human-readable language. Want to deep-dive on this. ANTHROPIC VIDEO

Camus stays “a silhouette” because people keep misreading him A new translation of Camus’s notebooks shows how Sartre-era hype flattened him into existentialism. The Oran Notebook ties his ideas to bodily, personal life. EXISTENTIALISM AND MISREADING REVIEW

I’m reading the most extraordinary book right now. You know how I am with excited hyperbole, but this book is stunning me big or small literally every few minutes.

Honestly think it’s like the ultimate sleeper. It came out in 2009, and the follow-up is from 2021, which I'm going to read right after this.

It's called "The Master and His Emissary," and it's about the hemispheres of the brain. But that is the worst description of the book imaginable.

I mean, it IS about that, but it’s so much more. I won’t spoil it.

This (and its follow-up in 2021) might be the most overlooked and important book(s) of the last few decades. No joke. That’s how I found them actually: Alex O’Connor was talking to Sam about them on some podcast.

Must read!