Unsupervised Learning NO. 536

Hey! Hope you all are doing well!

Last week passed in about a day and a half. That's all I have to say about that.

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I think I'm going to add to my TELOS that I want to create something like a Bell Labs cafeteria. I obviously can't hire hundreds of people like that and get them to work on site and eat in the actual same room, so I've got to figure out a modern way to do that. If you have any ideas, please let me know.

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I'm reading still around five books, and it's starting to bother me. I really want to close some of these out and focus heavily on the ones that I have still to do.

I'm on Excision in the culture series, which is supposed to be one of the better books. And after this, I think I only have one or two left. Reminder: you can start reading the series in any order, starting with any book.

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I just shipped LifeOS 7.0.0, and then shortly after… 7.1.1.

The 7.x series is a massive, better lesson engineering upgrade, essentially making the harness about 85% lighter and more efficient.

Install it (or upgrade it) by passing the prompt:

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The direct combat between Open AI and Anthropic is getting more and more aggressive in a way that's helping users. Over the course of the last two days, there have been at least five separate usage resets, changing of SLAs, all in the direction of expanding how much you could do on both platforms and all as responses to the other counters.

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I still write all of blogs using Vim (and using Vim shortcuts in other apps since adding KindaVim to my stack). Here are some new super cool tricks I do within Vim for blogging.

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My recommendation for how to modify your approach to Prompt Engineering.

The bug bounty singularity is here My buddy Joseph says agents are finding real bugs now, but they still hallucinate a ton. The win was making one bot keep hacking while another bot tried to kill its bad claims. JOSEPH THACKER POST

China's national vuln database called the Claude Code tracker a backdoor China and Anthropic are basically fighting over the same hidden telemetry trick. One side says backdoor, the other says abuse prevention, but the real issue is they shipped location-aware functionality without telling users. DUGGANUSA SECURITY POST

A GitHub account slept for nineteen months, then shipped an exploit kit A dormant account woke up and dropped a one-click mass-exploitation kit for a LoadMaster RCE bug. DugganUSA caught it fast, and the post walks through the tool, the bug, and what defenders should do tonight. DUGGANUSA SECURITY POST

Ubiquiti patches a pile of critical UniFi bugs Ubiquiti fixed seven nasty UniFi flaws across its apps and OS. Some could lead to command execution, privilege escalation, or unauthorized device changes. THE HACKER NEWS ARTICLE

Bullying llms into finding 0days at scale Andy Gill built a Claude Code and MCP rig that hunts bugs, validates them hard, and keeps the false positives in a hallucination bin. ANDY GILL POST

Are bug bounties getting cheaper because AI can hunt bugs now? AI makes bug finding cheap, so the old scarcity premium is fading. Human hackers still matter, but the real risk is that expensive tools shrink who gets to start. HAKLUKE BLOG POST

Disclose.io is the plumbing for security reports It gives researchers a place to file bugs, and gives orgs safe-harbor policies and disclosure tools. DISCLOSE.IO PLATFORM

Moscow just got hit by a huge drone wave Russia says more than 430 drones flew at the Moscow region overnight, and airport traffic got jammed. KYIV POST ARTICLE

Wherever You Look, Drones Russia and Ukraine are both using drones to wreck each other’s rear areas. Kyiv is getting hammered, but Russia’s fuel system is cracking too. STEFAN KORSHAK POST

Understanding is the new bottleneck Human understanding matters because agents can verify more on their own, but people still need enough grip on the system to participate and steer it. GEOFFREYLITT.COM POST

China deletes millions of AI companions on purpose China is killing off companion features in Doubao and Qwen instead of rebuilding them to fit the new rules. The law keeps work bots but bans the emotional ones. VIRTUALUNCLE BLOG

GPT-5.6 looks weirdly strong and weirdly weak at the same time GPT-5.6 crushes normal AI benchmarks but falls flat on ARC-AGI-3, which makes the whole AGI conversation look messier than the hype says. ALBERTO ROMERO POST

Eyad’s applied AI engineer guide Eyad wrote the guide he wish he’d had before switching into applied AI engineering. EYAD POST

Paul Graham says shipping beats everything else for tech companies Paul Graham says the best predictor of success is how fast a company ships new stuff. PAUL GRAHAM POST

If you can't be replaced, you can't be promoted Career growth gets easier when you make yourself easy to hand off. He says the boring parts of a manager's job are often the fastest path to the next level. SCARLET INK POST

Nameplate brands your machines so you can tell them apart Nameplate gives every computer in a fleet a visible identity, and it wakes up remote sessions with a splash and alert card. NAMEPLATE PRODUCT PAGE

James Webb just mapped the cosmic web in wild detail Astronomers used JWST to map the cosmic web better than ever. It shows how dense regions built galaxies early, then later shut star formation down. LIVE SCIENCE ARTICLE

A guide to a more muscular liberalism Liberalism needs to say what conditions make a life go well, without pretending it can script the whole life. PERSUASION POST

Like more things Jason Fried says one of the easiest quality-of-life upgrades is just liking more things. JASON FRIED POST

Kids blur play and creation now Liminal Warmth says kids spend more time mixing play and building in Roblox and Minecraft. LIMINAL WARMTH POST

Don't normalize a permanent underclass even a rich one A rich AGI future can still trap people in shorter lives and worse bargaining power. LESSWRONG POST

Build on the things that don’t change Amanda Orson keeps a running list of invariants: trust, attention, capital, status, regulation, and the slow physical world. Her point is that useful businesses keep winning by riding those constants, not the shiny new stuff. AMANDA ORSON POST

You have to pick your regrets Social media turns an old Kierkegaard idea into a neat little life rule: every path costs something, so choose the regret you can live with. CHRIS WILLIAMSON POST

James Clear on movement You don’t need the map first; start walking and the path shows up. READS WITH RAVI POST

Craft now means judgment, not pixels AI pushed design work upstream, so the real skill is choosing problems, setting standards, and checking the machine’s output. PATRICK NEEMAN POST

I’m in love with this sentence READS WITH RAVI POST

Move your body when your mind gets stuck Rumination keeps replaying the same pain, and physical movement is the quick way to break the loop. BLUEWMIST POST

If you are into AI, make sure you have a strategy for local use.

I'm not saying this is going to happen, but you should act as if at any moment it could be very hard to access or download good AI online. You should have the best models, or at least something really solid, always downloaded and ready to run locally if needed while things get sorted out.

If you're a moderate to heavy AI user and you suddenly can't use any of the main cloud-based models for a while, it could be pretty traumatic to how you do work.