Unsupervised Learning NO. 532

Hey! Hope you all are doing well!

Tons of stuff to share this week. And tons of stories, too.

First: There’s a show called PANTHEON on NETFLIX. Super cool animated series about life and AI and stuff, but it came out BEFORE GPT-4 (2022)! I’m early on it but the tech/hacking/AI writing is insanely great. PANTHEON ON NETFLIX

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Our friend Clint Gibler has joined OpenAI! They’re lucky to have him. THE ANNOUNCEMENT

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KindaVim actually kinda works. I disabled it for Kitty (my terminal), but it works pretty damn well in other apps, like Messages, writing emails, whatever. Loving having Vim everywhere! KINDAVIM

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You all are majorly sleeping on Surface. 🤣 I know I haven’t pushed it hard, but really. Like really, really, it’s getting so damn good. And I just shipped custom RSS feeds! (like HackerNews has) Go sign up and stuff! SIGN UP FOR SURFACE

Oh, and I’m about to release the mobile app I’ve been using to be public, which is the main way I use it.

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How I think about AI use in my newsletter (and any of my content, really)

I think this is already pretty obvious but I wanted to just capture it anyway. Anyone who knows AI well and has been watching my newsletter for a number of years knows that I’ve been using AI to help generate story summaries for a long time. I’ve done videos and essay on exactly how I do it as well, to help others do the same.

I also talk all the time about Keeping the Robots Out of the Gym, which may seem like a contradiction. But it’s not if you break down what the gym is and isn’t. For me the gym is primarily Thinking. Authenticity. Novelty. Like actual creative thought and output coming out of a human. That to me is sacred, and I think it should remain so. And I think outsourcing that to AI is not only bad for a newsletter or blog or whatever, but just bad in general to anyone who does it. It will rot you. It untrains the most important muscle to what makes us human.

So what should we be ok with giving to AI? And especially in a newsletter context?

The authenticity in my newsletter comes from any ACTUAL writing I do, which is in the essays I link, at the top of the newsletter, sometimes in the Ideas section, or in the Recommendation section.

But you’ll also notice that I do writing inside the summaries as well sometimes. I often cut or change or add lots of content to the quick little AI summary of a given story.

But the inclusion of that story in the first place is also authentic. I capture stories using Surface all week long, and I end up gathering somewhere like 200-500 stories on a given week. Those are the summaries I then have to go through and read (if I haven’t already) for the newsletter.

So those are already curated because I clicked the button in Surface to say it was interesting. Then they’re curated again when I cut them down to a couple dozen for the newsletter itself. Then if I remove, or modify, or add any content in the summary that’s another customization.

But the output is that the newsletter is always full written (for all writing) or fully assembled (in the case of snippets) by me. Every essay or analysis piece that appears to be written by me, like as an opinion, is always 100% written by me. I don’t use AI for writing opinion or analysis or ideas. If that ever changes it’ll be a big day and I’ll be thoroughly excited, and I will let you know. Where I can basically give my version of the core idea and it can convey it in my own words. Anyway, in those types of pieces the only place you’ll see me using AI is for like collections of examples, or collecting and testing support facts, etc. Which should be easily seen as support content vs. the actual argument. Again, it’s easy to tell the difference. So even the story snippets themselves are touched by me multiple times to result in the set of stories that make it in.

I say this not only as commentary on this newsletter, but on AI output from anyone. I can instantly tell most AI writing from real writing, not from the prose but from the content. I don’t give a bug’s butt if someone uses AI to show me interesting stories they found. In fact I want WAY MORE of that. But if they ever have AI come up with an idea or opinion and have it write out the idea as themselves, that’s a betrayal to me. It’s idea-stealing first of all, and it’s also deceptive. I want to hear ORIGINAL ideas, with an actual voice of the person. Like do I actually HEAR someone? An actual opinion? Or is it just a headline feeder with no personality in it? Both blandness and deception turn me straight off.

Anyway, I follow people because I want to hear what they think. So I can use it as one of my frames for seeing the world. I hope to continue being one such frame for you, and to keep it live with my actual opinions.

News snippets are a small portion of that value, in my opinion. It’s more about what news I choose to surface (lol), and even more importantly the stuff I write about in essays I link to, and the intro and the ideas sections, and in the recommendation and aphorism of the week.

I hope all this has been super clear all this time, and this explanation is not even required because it’s so obvious. But I wanted to write it down just in case.

Plot Twist: This was written 100% by AI. Just kidding. 0%. Thanks for reading.

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I’ve been going heavy (proper) coffee lately using that recipe I showed before. Cut down on Celsius consumption significantly.

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Me trying to self-pat-on-back about being first to Context and Harness Engineering in mid-2025 😆 THE THREAD

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A pre-discussion to a soon-to-occur video discussion about the ethics and morality of Dario Amodei. THE SETUP | THE VIDEO THAT STARTED IT

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My prediction about OpenAI’s next big move. THREAD

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Anthropic pulls Fable 5 and Mythos 5 after government order The government told Anthropic to cut access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for foreign nationals, and Anthropic says it has to comply. It thinks the alleged jailbreak is narrow and already easy to reproduce with other models. A lot of people are missing that the angle here is foreign nationals having access. Insane to think they took Fable from Karpathy! ANTHROPIC NEWS

Critical UniFi OS bug lets hackers gain root without authentication Attackers can chain three fixed UniFi OS flaws into unauthenticated root on the appliance. BLEEPING COMPUTER ARTICLE

Anthropic’s code-hunting harness is a real security workflow Anthropic built a reference repo for finding, verifying, and patching bugs with Claude. It’s aimed at security teams who want the full loop. ANTHROPIC REPO

Angry bug hunter drops another Windows zero-day on Microsoft Nightmare Eclipse published RoguePlanet, a Windows Defender bug that hits patched Windows 10 and 11. They also dropped exploit code and can get SYSTEM on an affected machine. THE REGISTER ARTICLE

China-linked hackers hid in Linux login software for years China-nexus attackers backdoored PAM and OpenSSH so they could steal logins and commands for nearly a decade. THE HACKER NEWS ARTICLE

Stolen iPhones just got a lot less resale-friendly Apple and the Met are tying stolen phones to better device checks, which could make resale and reactivation much harder. MALWAREBYTES ARTICLE

Everything Is Recorded Now DAVID HABER POST

Meta Ray-Bans are getting turned into creepy spy glasses Modders can disable the camera light for about fifty bucks, and that makes secret recording a lot easier. TECHRADAR ARTICLE

Free apps turn smart TVs into scraping proxies Free apps are quietly conscripting home devices into Bright Data's scraping network, and smart TVs are a perfect relay. Bright Data has sponsored us in the past, and I’m still a bit murky on what I think about the tech in general. I love the tech for how functional it is, and it’s technically all legal and such. I guess the real question is what it’s being used for, as in if it’s being used to bypass legit gates or to overcome crappy annoyances that shouldn’t exist. I suppose the answer is both. Need to think more about this. THE HACKER NEWS ARTICLE

Nearly a million passports were left out on the internet Sean Hollister found passport and ID photos sitting on public URLs with no protection at all. A security researcher says over 985,000 records were exposed, and some of them belonged to cannabis club members in Spain. THE VERGE REPORT

Pentagon raises Israel counterintel alert as tensions spike The Pentagon reportedly put Israel on its highest counterintelligence watch. EURONEWS ARTICLE

FBI shuts down Chinese fake consulting sites used to fish for secrets The FBI took down 13 fake consulting domains and says China used AI slop, job ads, and payment apps to lure security-clearance holders. SCMP ARTICLE

Chinese satellite firm snaps Nvidia and Apple HQs A sanctioned Chinese satellite company put out sharp pictures of Nvidia and Apple’s campuses. It calls that routine satellite news. SCMP ARTICLE

China is quietly building a spy web across Europe China’s running a wide espionage campaign in Europe, pulling in agents, lobbyists, tech workers, and even diplomats. The EU still has no real common shield. EL PAÍS ARTICLE

House moves to keep Ukraine money flowing The House broke with Trump again and passed a bill to keep Ukraine funded and hit Russia harder. THE GUARDIAN ARTICLE

DARPA wants one decoder for every military radio DARPA is trying to make one codec that can talk across all the military’s mismatched radio systems. That could cut latency, power use, and battlefield friction. DEFENCE BLOG ARTICLE

US army orders drone kits to detect battlefield threats INTERESTING ENGINEERING ARTICLE

The U.S. and Taiwan still can’t really fight as one team Taiwan keeps buying weapons and promising more defense spending, but the real problem is that its forces and America’s can’t mesh well in a fight. FOREIGN POLICY ARTICLE

Chinese spies are using LinkedIn to lure Westerners into sharing sensitive information Chinese spies are posing as recruiters on LinkedIn and other job sites to get Western workers to hand over non-public details. TECHCRUNCH ARTICLE

Putin’s strongman image is cracking under pressure Russia keeps rewarding obedience and hiding failure, so its leaders stop hearing the truth. Ukraine does the opposite and keeps adapting faster. KYIV POST VIDEO

Europe starts building a real response to China The EU is moving past tariffs and toward a bigger toolkit for Chinese overcapacity. ATLANTIC COUNCIL REPORT

I think people are massively underestimating one particular risk to the economy, which is a major security incident happening because of AI, and the government suddenly banning most AI as a result. What would happen to the trillions of dollars that are currently bolstering the (mostly US) economy? What if all that energy got suddenly pulled out of the conversation? It could be catastrophic, and we just saw with Fable that the government is capable of taking these kinds of actions. I don’t think the risks is anywhere near priced in.

Pangram says it can spot AI text and humanized edits Pangram is selling an AI detector plus plagiarism checker, and it leans hard on third-party verification and low false positives. I’ve heard this things actually works well. I don’t think it’s a long-term solution, but I’m surprised its as good as people say it is. PANGRAM PRODUCT PAGE

AI is creating a new layer of jobs Box, Google, and IBM are hiring people to make AI actually work inside companies. The new roles sit between models and operations. PYMNTS NEWS ARTICLE

Kpmg puts Claude in front of 276,000 staff KPMG is stuffing Claude into the tools its people already use, so AI sits inside the workflow instead of another chat box. THENEXTWEB ARTICLE

xAI looks like a datacenter business now xAI is leasing huge GPU blocks to Anthropic and Google, and the cash looks bigger than the AI story. MARTIN ALDERSON NEWSLETTER

Nvidia and LG are building an AI factory together NVIDIA and LG Group are wiring GPUs, robotics, mobility, and sovereign models into one giant physical AI stack. NVIDIA BLOG

SpaceX’s orbital data center gets a real spec sheet SpaceX finally puts numbers on its AI1 satellite. It wants a million of them, and the cooling problem is still brutal. TOM'S HARDWARE ARTICLE

Route public traffic to private apps with Cloudflare Cloudflare is letting people put WAF, caching, and Workers in front of private origins without opening them to the internet. CLOUDFLARE BLOG POST

Microsoft is trying to build its own AI stack now Microsoft spent years leaning on OpenAI, and now it’s racing to build models, agents, and security tools from scratch. The bet is that enterprise trust and Windows distribution can close the gap. THE VERGE REPORT

McDonald’s is trying AI at the drive-thru again NEW YORK POST ARTICLE

The web is getting built for AI instead of people AI tools are pushing the web toward plaintext and machine-readable structure. TECH POLICY PRESS PERSPECTIVE

Gemini can now script and edit videos in minutes This thread is basically seven prompt templates for turning Gemini into a video editor. It’s useful if you want faster rough cuts, hook rewrites, and retention tweaks. THREAD READER APP POST

The web is heading toward pay-to-crawl THE DECODER ARTICLE

Why ai can’t replace human art Maria Popova says AI can copy style, but it can’t do the living work that makes art matter. DAVID PERELL VIDEO

Therapy to make cells young again gets tried in a person TYLER COWEN POST

Trump moves thousands of federal workers into at-will status NEXTGOV ARTICLE

Reading old books is harder than people remember THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR ARTICLE

An ECG predicts stroke risk a decade out MASS GENERAL BRIGHAM PRESS RELEASE

Scientists turn seawater into drinking water without toxic brine SCITECHDAILY ARTICLE

Intent debt is the part agents can’t fix AI makes code and understanding cheaper, but it can’t invent the why behind your system. ADDY OSMANI BLOG

Over-explaining is emotional begging Dr. Nicole LePera says people over-explain when they’re scared, and the fix is to get shorter, calmer, and clearer. @THEHOLISTICPSYC POST

The good-enough worker is getting squeezed out AI is making average hires less valuable, so companies are paying up for the few people who are exceptional. More on this later from me, I’ll probably do a video or set of them on this. FAST COMPANY ARTICLE

You can't just do 3x as much Alex Hormozi says scaling breaks when people try to multiply effort instead of fixing the bottlenecks first. ALEX HORMOZI VIDEO

We make meaning by being here Ursula K. Le Guin says life doesn’t hand us meaning. We have to make it, and consciousness is what makes that possible. THE MARGINALIAN POST

LLM are universal simulators Paras Chopra says LLMs don’t just guess text; they build little models of the world and simulate domains from it. PARAS CHOPRA ESSAY

East Bay red flag check helps you decide if tonight is dangerous Type your address and it tells you whether the warning applies, plus your evacuation zone and next steps. RED FLAG CHECK

The guy who reads books for Hollywood is basically a human filter Clarke Speicher reads books for studios, then turns them into adaptation reports that decide whether a project lives or dies. LIT HUB ARTICLE

The most expensive AI mistake isn't prompting The real waste is treating AI like a prompt problem instead of a workflow problem. AI NEWS & STRATEGY DAILY VIDEO

The AI Jobs Apocalypse Is Not in the Data: CHART OF THE DAY BRAD DELONG POST

10GbE fixed my home network and made Wi‑Fi better Rich Woods says he finally stopped treating wired networking like overkill and found that 10GbE cleaned up the whole house. I did the same recently (plus running 100gbit fiber in the walls) and I’m loving it too. XDA DEVELOPERS ARTICLE

Your moral ambition can change the world The book says smart people waste too much talent on status games. It pushes them toward work that actually helps other people. SEOUL ECONOMIC DAILY ARTICLE

Plex Pass is pricey, but it still wins at home Plex got more expensive, but the author keeps it because his family already uses it and remote access stays painless. XDA DEVELOPERS ARTICLE

Start thinking about a world might look like if a major model development happens, or an AI-related major incident happens, and the government basically makes Open Source downloads illegal.

If you’re into this stuff you want to have a local fallback plan so you can have decently good AI locally, so you’re not forced to (only) use whatever officially sanctioned stuff is out there.

Not saying its imminent. Just saying it could happen any moment and you want to be ready if it does.