Daniel Miessler's Blog, page 23

How to Get the OBS Studio Virtual Cam to Work in Discord on Mac

This is harder than it should be. Way harder.

0. Enable your terminal to make changes

Open System Settings -> Privacy & Security -> App Management and give permission to your Terminal program

1. Install Xcode

Xcode-select --install (enter your password)

2. Remove the existing signature

sudo codesign --remove-signature "/Applications/Discord.app/Contents/Frameworks/Discord Helper (Renderer).app"

3. Re-sign the app

sudo codesign --sign - "/Applications/Discord.app/Contents/Frameworks/Discord Helper (Renderer).app"

If you don’t do step 0 you’re not going to be able to remove the signature in step 2.

Why is this so hard in 2023?

NO. 378 — AI Resilience Scale, Moloch the Demon, Ukraine Data Leak, and more…

*|INTERESTED:Memberful Plans:UL Subscription (Annual) (53074)|* MEMBER EDITION | NO. 378 | APR 17 2023 | Subscribe | Online | Audio *|END:INTERESTED|**|INTERESTED:Memberful Plans:UL Subscription (Annual) (53074)|**|ELSE:|* STANDARD EDITION (UPGRADE) | NO. 378 | APR 17 2023 | Subscribe | Online | Audio *|END:INTERESTED|* Happy Monday—I hope you’re doing well!

Ok, here’s the idea of the week: Maloch. It’s a race to the bottom that we can’t avoid running. We don’t want to run it. We know it’s bad for us. But we feel compelled to. And plus, everyone else is doing it so we don’t want to be the only left out! 

And with that happy thought, let’s get into the week!



In this episode:

🤖 AI vulnerability scale
🌌 Moloch’s danger
🌐 Post-GPT world
🕵️‍♂️ Discord leak
🛡️ OpenAI bounty
🇰🇵 North Korea vs. 3CX
📱 Israeli spyware
🤖 NYC robots
🚕 Robotaxi success
😢 Teen mental health crisis
🚫 AI bans, and more!


MY WORK
The Hierarchy of Content
A rating scale for how vulnerable your content is to being replaced by AI. MORE

Moloch: The Most Dangerous Idea
If we are alone in the universe, this is probably why. MORE

6 Phases of the Post-GPT World
The implications of connecting GPT-4 to the internet, and the tech that will result. MORE


SECURITY NEWS
Discord Intelligence Leak
A US National Guardsman named Jack Teixeira leaked a number of Top Secret military documents in his Discord Server group over a number of months. The documents were further shared elsewhere, causing them to leak all over the internet. The leak detailed Ukraine’s plans for a counter-offensive, as well as details about various European countries that were giving aid to Ukraine. Teixeira has been arrested under the Espionage Act. MORE | NYTIMES | BELLINGCAT

OpenAI Bug Bounty Program
OpenAI launched its Bug Bounty Program with BugCrowd, inviting hackers to help identify and address vulnerabilities in their AI systems. Rewards range from $200 to $20,000 based on severity and impact. Great job to both teams! I can only imagine the firehose of vulns people have been sitting on. MORE | PROGRAM

North Korea vs. 3CX
Mandiant has been investigating the 3CX supply chain attack and has concluded that it’s the work of a North Korean threat actor called UNC4736. The attackers targeted with malware called Taxhaul, which deploys a downloader called Coldcat. 3CX has shared YARA rules and IOCs to detect the malware. MORE

More Israeli Spyware
A little-known Israeli spyware company has been using its software against journalists and political figures across three continents. Citizen Lab and Microsoft Threat Intelligence published reports calling out QuaDream for its Rein software, which is “a suite of exploits, malware, and infrastructure designed to exfiltrate data from mobile devices.” MORE Sponsor
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With 75+ out-of-the-box framework templates, including SOC 2, NIST, FedRAMP, and ISO 27001, our built-in requirements and customizable controls will satisfy the needs of your products and industry. Connect your controls to risks to better protect your business and see where you stand in real time with our risk register.

Book a demo today to see why Hyperproof is G2’s #1 trending software for IT Risk Management and GRC.
 learn.hyperproof.io/built-to-scale-unsupervised  Book a Demo Amazon S3 Security Update
Amazon S3 has started deploying two new default security settings for all new buckets, including enabling S3 Block Public Access and disabling S3 access control lists (ACLs) for all new buckets. Rejoice! MORE

NCR Aloha POS Outage
NCR’s Aloha point-of-sale platform suffered an outage due to a ransomware attack by the BlackCat/ALPHV gang, impacting hospitality customers and business operations. MORE

FBI Warns Against Public Chargers
The FBI says people should avoid using public USB charging stations for their mobile phones. They said the stations in places like malls and airports may be compromised and could install malware on connected devices. MORE 

Cyber Investment Down 58%
Venture-backed cybersecurity startups saw 58% less investment than a year ago, which represented a 45% drop (149 total) in deal flow. MORE 

NYC Robots
New York City abandoned its robot dog plans after a massive outcry two years ago, but now it’s bringing them back. They’ve ordered two of the Boston Dynamics Spot Bots. The city says the $75K bots will mostly be used like bomb robots for now and they won’t be run autonomously. They’re also deploying a Knitescope K5 robot, which is designed to counter vandalism and break-ins. Really wish that one looked less like a Dalek. MORE | THE KNITESCOPE K5

Fake Chinese Officials
The FBI is warning Chinese people in America to not fall for scammers claiming to be part of the PRC. They say scammers are posing as officials and stealing money from Chinese citizens. This works well because newly arrived Chinese people anywhere in the world are still strongly tied to China, and feel beholden to Chinese authorities. The FBI says to call them if you believe you have a legitimate request from China, as they are required to register with the FBI for such activities. MORE | MORE

Vulnerabilities Microsoft issues fixes for 97 flaws, including an actively used ransomware exploit MORE
 TECHNOLOGY NEWS
The SIMS + AI
Google and Stanford collaborated to create human-like AI characters that operate in a SIMS like environment called Smallville. There are 25 separate personas that wak up, have breakfast, and go on about their days. They interact with each other and do many other human-like activities. The whole thing is seeded with just one paragraph of prompt text for each character, and they take it from there. Researchers interviewed the characters after they had been running for a while and found that some had careers. One had decided to run for mayor and described his plans after he took office. MORE | MORE

AI Wage Discrimination
Companies like Uber and Amazon use AI to pay workers different wages for the same work, raising concerns about “algorithmic wage discrimination” spreading to other industries. MORE

Robotaxi Success
Robotaxis in San Francisco seem to be running quite smoothly. The city required them to keep detailed logs on how much disruption was being caused by Cruise and Waymo robotaxis, and the numbers are remarkably small. There were evidently only 12 driverless-caused reports from September 2022 to March of 2023. MORE

33% SF Vacancy
Office vacancies in San Francisco have hit 33%, and 23% in Silicon Valley. Both are records. MORE


HUMAN NEWS
Teen Girls’ Mental Health Crisis
A new CDC report reveals that nearly 1/3 of teen girls have considered attempting suicide. 30%! And nearly 3 in 5 (57%) felt persistently sad or hopeless in 2021. That’s double the number of boys, and up nearly 60% from the past decade. CDC

Whole Foods Closes Flagship SF Store
Whole Foods is closing its main store in San Francisco due to safety concerns for its workers. MORE


IDEAS & ANALYSIS
Expect AI Bans?
I am of two minds about what’s going to happen with AI. If things go slow enough I think it’ll pull us out of our recession and start a new productivity boom. But if things go too quickly I think we’ll have acute job losses and world governments will start banning AI replacement of jobs. I’m currently siding a bit more towards the latter. When I predicted the recession piece it was before GPT-4, plugins, and Langchain Agents. I’m now thinking governments are more likely to get spooked and pull out the ban hammer. MORE


NOTES
I’ve got Agents working in Langchain! And not just working, but calling my own APIs. In my most recent run I ask my Agent to analyze the Solarwinds incident so it makes two requests—one to Google to learn about the incident, and one to my API to analyze the incident. Completely insane!  I’ll share the screenshot and maybe some code as well in chat.

The stuff I wrote about in my book in 2016 is starting to happen. I’m going to be talking a bit more about that in the next few weeks. I actually re-read the book and it’s not nearly as bad as I thought it was. So crazy that it’s all happening this fast. I had high confidence the things I wrote about would happen, but I honestly thought it would be another 10-15 years.

I’ll be around the RSA area, so if you’re in town let me know. We’ll be doing another UL Dinner as well so look out for the invite in chat! 


DISCOVERY
⚒️ chatbot-ui — Run your own local ChatGPT interface using your API key instead of OpenAI’s web interface. It’s faster and doesn’t have the query limits of the official interface. MORE | BY MCKAY WRIGLEY | MY SCREENSHOT

⚒️ Auto-GPT — an experimental open-source application showcasing the capabilities of the GPT-4 language model. This program, driven by GPT-4, chains together LLM “thoughts”, to autonomously achieve whatever goal you set. MORE | BY SIGNIFICANT GRAVITAS

⚒️ Ben’s Bites — Hacker News, but for AI MORE

It happened to me today ($80/hr writer replaced by ChatGPT) MORE

How much would someone have to pay you to switch from iPhone to Android forever? MORE

Laid off by big tech and then recruited for contract work—at the same place. MORE

Hyperproof (Sponsor) — Cut your time preparing for audits in half, automate evidence collection, and increase audit team productivity by 70%. MORE

Cole Comfort from our UL Community has a new podcast. Check out the first episode with Toby Amodio! MORE

JupiterOne’s 2023 State of Cyber Assets Report MORE

Nick St. Pierre is the best natural photography prompter in the world. MORE

Sam Altman says they’re not training GPT-5 and ‘won’t for some time’. MORE

Huberman Labs’ Sleep Toolkit MORE

ProjectDiscovery is having a meetup for users on Tuesday, April 25th at RSA. There will be demos and swag! MORE

Altman also says the parameter count is a lot like the gigahertz race from the 1990s, and that ultimately it won’t matter as much as other factors. MORE

MacOS Cursors MORE


RECOMMENDATION OF THE WEEK
Programming 0 -> 1
It’s hard to know what skills we will need to thrive post-AI, but I’m pretty certain that programming just became even more important. Not super deep programming in any particular language, but programming concepts. The fundamentals. The ability to stitch code together and make things. I asked Twitter for the best way to get those fundamentals and the CS50 course from Harvard was a favorite. If you don’t consider yourself a programmer, go take that course (it’s free), and start getting dirty with GPT-4 and Lanchain. It’s the new literacy. CS50

 
APHORISM OF THE WEEK
“The unknown is the greatest enemy, but curiosity is the greatest weapon.”

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Moloch: The Most Dangerous Idea

Moloch is a strong candidate for the most dangerous idea. If we’re alone in this universe, it’s likely because of Moloch.

It’s pronounced MOL-uck.

What is it? Practically speaking, it’s something like an accelerating race towards a goal that has both a tremendous payoff and that guarantees our destruction. It’s a race to the bottom, where the bottom is the destruction of our species.

Moloch is a race that’ll probably kill us, but that we can’t help but run.

I heard Max Tegmark talk about the concept recently on Lex Fridman’s podcast, and have heard the term a few times elsewhere in the last few months. But never before that, which is curious.

Wikipedia’s Article

The concept ( מלך mlk in Hebrew) comes from the Old Testament as a name of a Canaanite god associated with human sacrifice, but some scholars also think it might refer to sacrifice itself. Either way it was considered a bad thing in the Bible wherever it was mentioned.

Johann Lund’s 18th Century Depiction of Moloch

That definition also fits well with the modern interpretation. Sacrifices were done to gain something from the gods, so it’s essentially, “doing something bad so that you can get something in return”.

Another interpretation is one that Max mentioned in the podcast with Lex, which is a demon that convinces you to play this game. So in that model it’s not the game itself that’s the enemy, but the force that’s enticing us to play the game.

There are remarkably few definitions available anywhere, so this is my attempt at it.

I’m not sure that distinction matters much, so I’m going to refine the definition above and say it’s:

> A greed and/or FOMO-based race to the bottom where everyone loses as soon as someone wins.

The inevitable game

As Max talks about on the podcast, Moloch is toxically seductive. It stacks selfishness on top of FOMO on top of practicality.

Here are some examples:

There are smaller-scale moloch games as well.

The Race to AGINuclear ArmamentHuman CloningGene EditingGrowing Economies Using Fossil Fuels

Taking the game of the hour as an example, everyone is sprinting towards AGI at top speed not only because they want the benefits—which they do—but also because they know everyone else is sprinting. So that’s the FOMO aspect.

The worst part is that everyone knows they should stop running, but they can’t.

But we also know it’ll give us tremendous economic and military advantages. So the greed kicks in and makes us run even faster.

And finally we have good ol’ self-preservation. Living under a super-intelligence-powered China would not be fun for anyone. And that’s assuming China could control it.

Unsupervised Learning — Security, Tech, and AI in 10 minutes…Get a weekly breakdown of what's happening in security and tech—and why it matters.

So even if the West was able to control its greed, and wanted to stop, we know China and Russia won’t. So we won’t either.

The Hail Mary solution

Individuals can’t stop the race because you need everyone to stop at the same time.

The depressing part is how difficult the solution is. It’s obvious. It’s right there in front of us. But nobody is going to do it.

We have to all stop together.

The US. China. Russia. Europe. Asia. The entire world has to stop together and say,

> Hey, let’s pause for a second and come up with some ground rules so we don’t destroy ourselves.

But we probably won’t do that—hence why this is probably the most dangerous idea in the world. Maybe it’s this Moloch Barrier that stops most civilizations from progressing beyond a certain point in their development.

All those trillions of stars out there—all those planets—and we haven’t seen anyone. Maybe they’re just too far away. Some experts believe that. But maybe billions of civilizations got to where we are and they just couldn’t make it past the Moloch Barrier.

Maybe they couldn’t find a way to exit the race before they killed themselves with AI, nukes, bioweapons, or whatever. We need to find a way out of this race.

Nothing is more important.

Notes Tegmark points out some examples of anti-molochs, include gossip, the legal system, and regulation. Howl, by Allen Ginsberg is a poem about Moloch. MORE

The Hierarchy of Content

Humans are creative. It’s one of the things that separates us from the other animals. Other animals create things, but most don’t change what they create based on new ideas, or how they feel.

Much of our culture revolves around this. And our economies. Our very society is based on creating and sharing or selling new things. So it’s pretty significant when something like AI comes along with the ability to replicate much of that creation.

How much thought vs. leg-work is in your content? The more leg-work the more vulnerable you are.

This is a look at what types of creation there are, and which might be most vulnerable to replacement by artificial intelligence.

The hierarchy of content

This chart has nine total tiers which are three-part breakouts of three fundamental levels:

Higher is better.

CreatingAnalyzingCurating

Curating, organizing, and collecting are all combined into Curation in this 3-level system. Summarization, explanation, and analysis are combined into Analysis. And enhancement, thinking, and creating are combined into Creation.

A brief aside on curation

One thing to mention about Curation is that there are levels to that game, meaning Curation is only level 3 of this model, but one can argue that carefully filtering certain stories combined with Enhancing or Thinking can also be considered Curation, and that it’s much more valuable than level 3.

Curation can be quite advanced, but most is basic link filtering based on interest.

I agree with that, but I think most curation—in newsletters for example—isn’t so grand as presenting a life perspective. It’s more like link selection and presentation, which is to say that curation happens naturally when you ask people to choose what’s interesting to them. In other words, there’s basic curation and advanced curation. And the advanced version is somewhere up around level 8, while the most common one is at level 3.

Unsupervised Learning — Security, Tech, and AI in 10 minutes…Get a weekly breakdown of what's happening in security and tech—and why it matters. Vulnerability to AI

The bottom of the chart is most vulnerable, and the top is the most safe.

You don’t want to be here

AI is extraordinarily good at collecting stuff, filtering it, organizing it, and yes—even selecting which things to include based on a set of preferences. So if you’re in the bottom three levels you should be thinking about how to pivot.

Example: Newsletters of links on various topics.

AI is really good at this too, so tread carefully

Next we have analysis, which feels a lot safer, but one of the things I use AI most for is explaining things. There’s a simple rule here that you should use. If you explain things well in your own unique voice, you have more time here. But if you just pull out the relevant information in a particular structure you’re at risk here as well.

Example: Newsletters of links with basic summarization.

The safest by a wide margin

Finally we have creation. This is where you’re either adding ideas to an existing idea, creating a new thing based on existing ideas, or creating something completely new based on a completely new idea. So building a company for example is either ENHANCE or CREATE.

A blog where you post new ideas is THINK. And a blog or newsletter where you come up with new ideas and ship something useful based on those ideas would be CREATE. This tier will survive for the longest, but I’ve already had significant success making completely new things with GPT-4, so it’s no place to relax.

SummaryIf you’re a creator, find where your content sits on this chartFigure out how to climb up a few rungsThink long-term about what your brand is and how you can eventually get it into the THINK and/or CREATE tiers for maximum survivability against AI

AI content is about to explode. Automated newsletters in precisely your space. New products, new services, new art, and everything in-between. Be ready.

NO. 377 | AI vs. Newsletters, NIST’s AI framework, Integrating GPT into your workflows…

STANDARD EDITION (UPGRADE) | NO. 377 | APR 10 2023 | Subscribe | Online | Audio Happy Monday—I hope you’re well!

I’ve been obsessed with langchain this past week. It’s like the coolest tech in AI right now, not counting GPT-4 and Midjourney. It’s basically the connective tissue for building AI applications. Think of it like the pipe “|” command in Linux. You should check it out. MORE

Meanwhile, let’s get into the week!



In this episode:

🛡️ Semgrep + AI: Enhancing code security
📉 Goldman Sachs predicts AI’s impact on jobs
🤖 AI’s threat to newsletters & the future of content
🔍 Unmasking money and power with AI’s transparency
🌉 Exploring the gap between pre-AI and post-AI worlds
📚 AI replacing tutorial webpages with assistants
🚰 The power of building pipelines over fixing things
📚 NIST AI Risk Management Framework & playbook
🚗 Tesla’s video sharing privacy concerns
📸 Iranian women monitored by public cameras
🌆 Crime density stats: SF vs. Baltimore
💻 Microsoft’s TaskMatrix.AI & Langchain’s success
👴 Hiring older workers for their work ethic
🏭 US manufacturing resurgence & green efforts
🔭 JWST captures stunning Neptune image


MY WORK
AI‘s Threat to Newsletters
Most newsletters won’t survive the burst of AI-generated completion we’re about to see. Only one kind will likely survive. MORE

Unmasking Money and Power With AI
GPTs will magnify transparency in the world, and make it easier than ever to “follow the money”. MORE

The Pre-AI World, the Post-AI World, and the Gap In-between
Can AI lead us to a post-capitalist society focused on creativity and humanity? MORE

AI is the End of Tutorial Webpages
AI assistants will replace traditional tutorials and change how we consume information. MORE

Don’t Fix Things; Build Pipelines
Why pipelines are a superior mental model for problem-solving. MORE


SECURITY NEWS
Semgrep + AI
Semgrep added GPT-4 to their offering to help identify false positives and fix code. The integration allows them to auto-triage findings, fix code automatically, and provide direct assistance to developers. MORE

NIST AI Risk
NIST released its AI Risk Management Framework at the end of January, and it now has a companion playbook and video explainer. The framework is based on four primary concepts: Govern, Manage, Map, and Measure. FRAMEWORK | PLAYBOOK | EXPLAINER

Tesla Video Sharing
Ex-Tesla employees said it was possible to get access to sensitive in-car video recordings within Teslas, including ‘scenes of intimacy’. Pretty much the privacy nightmare—employees passing around stuff that can cause you reputational harm. MORE
 
CISA Orders BackupExec Patch
CISA added five issues to its list of vulnerabilities abused by threat actors, and three of them were Veritas Backup Agent issues used to deploy ransomware. MORE

Iranian Women Cameras
Iran is installing cameras in public to catch and penalize women who don’t wear the veil. The system starts with a warning text message informing them of the consequences. MORE

Crime Density Stats
Someone did some analysis on crimes per square foot of major cities, and San Francisco came out worse than Baltimore. MORE | MORE Sponsor
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Discover how to meet international privacy requirements, navigate liability as an online property owner, and evaluate your security stack for privacy compliance. Stay ahead of the game – download our white paper now.
 hcaptcha.com/ul  Download hCaptcha’s White Paper Now TECHNOLOGY NEWS
Microsoft Taskmatrix.AI
Microsoft has introduced an AI API infrastructure called TaskMatrix.AI. It works by, “integrating foundation models with millions of existing models and system APIs, resulting in a “super-AI” that can perform various digital and physical tasks.” MORE | PAPER

Mild Layoffs?
Crunchbase says the massive layoffs of over 200K people in the last 14 months only add up to around 8% of the people hired after the pandemic. MORE 

Computer Shipment Declines
Computer sales are way down, with Mac shipments down 22% and most PC makers slumping over 40%. Related to that, Foxconn also dropped 21% in March, and they expect further decreases. MORE 

Langchain Raise
Langchain has raised a $10 million seed round led by Benchmark. It’s the tech powering a ton of the advanced GPT-based apps you’re seeing right now, and I think they’re crushing it. MORE 


HUMAN NEWS
Goldman AI Loss
Goldman Sachs says 300 million jobs will be lost or degraded by AI. Sounds directionally correct, but the real questions are 1) how many will also be created, and 2) how quickly all these things will happen, and 3) how people and economies will respond. MORE | PAPER

NATO Finland
Finland is now part of NATO. MORE 

SF Murder
A well-known tech entrepreneur, Bob Lee, was stabbed and killed in San Francisco last week. He had moved out of the city for safety reasons. As a former SF resident, this resonates strongly with me. I really do feel like the city is lawless, and as a liberal, this angers me. I was told by people growing up that you don’t want to live in liberal cities because they ruin everything. I didn’t believe them. I still don’t think that’s the case everywhere, but it sure seems true for San Francisco. Too much of it looks like a set for The Last of Us, and I feel uneasy whenever I’m there now. MORE 

Hiring Older
Bosses need hard workers, so they’re hiring older people who have a different work ethic. MORE 

America is Back in Manufacturing
The US spent $108 billion on manufacturing-focused construction in 2022, which is more than schools, healthcare facilities, or office buildings. The trend is tied to green efforts and a desire to secure our supply chains. MORE

JWST Neptune
The JWST telescope just caught a wicked photo of Neptune, showing its moons and its massive ice ring system. MORE


IDEAS & ANALYSIS
Mind the Font
If you’re blogging on a platform where the font looks the same no matter who’s writing—i.e., your content looks identical to everyone else’s—that means it’s their platform, not yours. When you read the New York Times, you’re not reading authors, you’re reading The Times. Maybe that’s ok if you’re building a career as a writer and you’re picking big names to establish credibility, like writing for the New Yorker, then The Atlantic, so you can make it to the New York Times. That makes sense. Or at least it did like a year ago (not sure about now). But as a new blogger that’s not your situation. Your goal should be broadcasting as yourself as purely as possible. And that means controlling the look and feel of your content. It should look and feel different than other people’s stuff. Blogging on Medium or Substack is like showing up to do a talk wearing a company uniform, covered in their logos. Again, not bad if it’s the best brand in the world, but probably not worth it if it’s not.

The End of Googling
We need a new word for Googling something. I’ve probably switched to GPT for 85% of my searches in the last month or so. Paul Graham said his 10-year-old doesn’t Google things anymore. He either uses GPT or Pokedex. Makes sense. So what’s the term? GPT’d? Too long. AI’d? Cumbersome. I wonder if it’ll just be called “searching”, and the Kleenex naming advantage Google had will just fall off. What are your guesses for the new verb?


NOTES
I’ve had my life elevated by a couple of utilities in the last week. 1) Espanso. It’s a Rust-based, YAML-configured text expansion system. It lets you run shell commands as well so I’ve integrated it with my AI APIs for doing quick little shortcuts like ;essay, ;correct, ;proofread, ;analyze-incident, etc. to get instant analysis within any text location, including in my terminal. 2) MacGPT. It’s a little utility that lets you call GPT directly from your Mac. You just call up the shortcut and a little window pops up and you type in your question. For whatever reason it’s lighting fast. The combination of these two things have accelerated my life greatly in the last couple of weeks.

My buddy Matt Jay has a new newsletter, and he’s on the sixth episode right now. It’s called Vulnerable U, and its focus is on how we can use vulnerabilities, and vulnerability, as a catalyst for growth. Matt’s content is spectacular, and I recommend you check it out. MORE 


DISCOVERY
⚒️ The Lex Fridman Podcast ChatGPT Plugin
ChatGPT now has access to every episode of Lex’s podcast. MORE | BY RILEY TOMASEK

⚒️ A GPT-powered Poem Clock
Someone made a clock out of poems, using GPT to create the rhymes. MORE | BY MATT WEBB

Why I Blog MORE | BY DANNY GUO

Langchain as a ChatGPT Plugin MORE

🔥 OpenAPIEndpointChain — Wraps a single API endpoint in a natural language interface. MORE

Everything is a Practice MORE | BY DANNY GUO

How to create a podcast search tool using Lanchain Tools. MORE

Video is the next target for Generative AI, and things are already getting crazy. MORE

Midjourney has banned all images of Chinese President Xi Jinping. MORE


RECOMMENDATION OF THE WEEK  Espanso for text expansion. MacGPT for immediate access to GPT-4. Constantly be thinking about the services you provide and where they sit in the hierarchy of ideas. What about what you do can be replaced easily, and what about what you do is resilient? Are you the SME? Are you creating AI tools? Or are you the polymath glue that solves problems with AI?  
APHORISM OF THE WEEK
“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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AI’s Threat to Newsletters

AI-driven newsletters are almost here. As artificial intelligence improves, it poses a significant threat to the traditional newsletter format. In particular, three types of newsletters are at risk: raw collectors, curation and comment newsletters, and idea-based newsletters.

Raw collectors are the most vulnerable. These newsletters simply gather a large number of links and present them to readers with minimal context or commentary. As AI becomes more sophisticated, it will be able to perform this task more efficiently and effectively than humans, rendering raw collectors obsolete within a matter of months.

AI’s rapid advancement has already begun to outpace human curation abilities.

Curation and comment newsletters are the next in line. These newsletters select a few noteworthy items to highlight and provide a custom summary for each. While this format requires a higher level of AI sophistication to execute, that level of technology is quickly approaching. Within six months to a year, these newsletters will face serious competition from AI-driven alternatives.

The final, and least vulnerable, category is idea-based newsletters. These publications focus on presenting new and original ideas, which are more difficult for AI to replicate. However, even idea-based newsletters must adapt to the changing landscape by incorporating original content and a strong vision for the future.

The key to surviving the AI revolution is originality and vision.

A successful newsletter in the age of AI will follow the IDEA, BUILD, and SHOW model. This approach involves presenting an original idea, creating something useful based on that idea, and showcasing it to readers or allowing them to interact with it. This model can be applied to both blogs and newsletters, ensuring their survival in a world dominated by AI.

Even as AI encroaches on the territory of traditional newsletters, there will still be a place for discussing news and filtering stories for a specific audience. The crucial factor that will set successful newsletters apart is vision. Those with a clear perspective on the world and a plan for what they want to build within it will be able to provide value to their readers by offering informed opinions and insights on relevant news.

A strong vision and original ideas are essential for newsletters to thrive in the AI era.

In contrast, newsletters that lack a distinct point of view or original content will struggle to compete with AI-driven alternatives. As AI becomes increasingly adept at curating and summarizing news, these generic newsletters will find it difficult to maintain their relevance.

SummaryRaw collectors and curation/comment newsletters are at the greatest risk from AI.Idea-based newsletters can survive by focusing on original content and vision.The IDEA, BUILD, and SHOW model is crucial for success in the AI era.Newsletters with a strong vision can still provide value by discussing news and filtering stories for their audience.Generic newsletters without original ideas will struggle to compete with AI-driven alternatives.

To survive and thrive in this new era, newsletters must adapt by focusing on original content, vision, and the IDEA, BUILD, and SHOW model. By doing so, they can continue to provide value to their readers and maintain their relevance in a world increasingly dominated by AI.

Don’t Fix Things; Build Pipelines

I think one of the most powerful ideas in business—or any kind of organization really—is the distinction between fixing things vs. building pipelines.

I used to think about fixing things. You work a company. You see a problem. You talk to the right people, make the correction, and you move on.

Maybe you will stop that thing from happening once or twice, if that person is the one doing it, but if you haven’t changed the permanent process for how it gets done, you haven’t actually fixed anything.

So basically, everything that gets done can be thought of as a pipeline. Water goes in one side, lots of things happen to it along the way, and it comes out the other side.

If you want to change what comes out, you need to fully understand the entire pipeline and change the components that affect that outcome.

And not just change them, but document those changes (or start the documentation if it didn’t exist before), and then communicate the change. Finally, you have to make it very clear how changes to the process are handled.

Who submits a change? When and where is it discussed? How is it approved? How is it actually changed? And how is that communicated?

Once this is in place you now have a pipeline for that thing getting done. Maybe that’s a security assessment for new projects. Or maybe it’s a review of a vendor to see if they can work with the business.

It’s a permanent, documented, and communicated process with visible components that people can understand and know how to modify.

Don’t fix mistakes. Update pipelines.

SummaryPipeline thinking is a proactive approach to problem-solving that focuses on building systems rather than fixing individual issues.To build a pipeline, document the existing process, identify areas for improvement, and implement changes.Communicate the new process clearly and establish a system for reviewing and updating the pipeline as needed.Pipeline thinking fosters a culture of continuous improvement and innovation.

The Pre-AI World, the Post-AI World, and the Gap In-between

Contemplating the impact of AI on society is a fascinating exercise, even though no one can predict the future with certainty.

Capitalism has served us well so far, but it may be time for a new economic system. I believe we are transitioning from an economy driven by materialism and greed to one focused on creativity and exploration, or in other words, humanity.

Economic systems evolve alongside human development and technological advancements. Capitalism has thrived in the wake of the industrial and information revolutions, but it may not be compatible with the rise of AI. Artificial intelligence threatens to eliminate countless “bullshit jobs,” as David Graeber calls them, and this is just the beginning.

However, there is a silver lining. AI has the potential to usher in a new era of creativity and exploration. Imagine a world where everyone’s intelligence is augmented by AI assistants, and people are free to pursue their passions in art, music, science, and more. In this world, our basic needs are met by AI and robots, leaving us to focus on creation and sharing our work with others.

Of course, some may choose to immerse themselves in games or other pursuits, but the overall emphasis would be on a more compassionate and selfless society. This new world could be sustainable for thousands of years, provided that intelligent and responsible leaders guide us through the challenges that lie ahead.

The question remains: how do we get there? The transition from our current state to this utopian vision will be fraught with obstacles. We may face war, population decline, or other catastrophes along the way. Alternatively, AI could force the issue and accelerate the transformation, though this would not be without its own risks.

The worst-case scenario is that we never reach this post-AI world. Instead, we might amplify our existing greed and selfishness with AI, or even destroy ourselves with nuclear weapons or uncontrolled superintelligence.

In summary, we stand at a crossroads between our current state, the potential of AI, the promise of a post-AI world centered on creativity and humanity, and the unknown challenges that lie between. As we enter this uncharted territory, it is crucial that we make wise decisions and hope for a bit of luck along the way.

AI is the End of Tutorial Webpages

Since 1999, most of my site traffic has been from technical tutorials. That’s going away.

I’ve been writing technical tutorials for things like tcpdump, lsof, etc, for years. More broadly, I’ve been explaining technical topics in more approachable language.

Only ideas will survive this purge.

Here’s a good example: the difference between red and blue teams. Or the definition of a purple team, and when you might use one. Or even better: disambiguation of all the different assessment types, e.g., vulnerability assessments, penetration tests, white box vs. black box assessments, etc.

Tutorials are replaced with AIs explaining documentation.

These tutorials were tremendously successful, and that time is now over.

The future interface for tutorials is digital assistants. When you want to know something—virtually anything—you’ll simply ask your assistant. Or, for many people it’ll be more than an assistant. It’ll be their companion.

This is MacGPT’s interface.

Anyway, if you want to know the proper syntax for adding a port, you’ll just ask it. And it’ll tell you. If you tell it that was not what you wanted, and you need something else on top of it, it’ll tell you that too.

Manually searching webpages for gold is about to feel very antiquated.

Here’s one I just thought of for finding NTP traffic.

The old method for this was vastly inferior. You’d take your question to Google, type it in, and then start wading through webpages of questionable information architecture until you found the right one.

But once you found it, you only had the webpage. You still had to read/parse that webpage to find (hopefully) what you were looking for.

Not the case with AI assistants. They give you the specific answer. No google required.

The one I’m using above is called MacGPT, which is just a slick front end to GPT-4. But that’s crude compared to what we’re about to have. We’re about to just ask our own assistant, who knows everything about us and how we like to consume information.

So we’ll ask it, and it’ll consume the world’s APIs, and give you the perfect answer in the way that works best for you.

I enjoyed making tutorials. I did it for 24 years. It was a solid run. But that’s over now.

What comes next

So what do we write if we don’t write tutorial-like content? Or more broadly—if we’re not disseminating factual information, which is what AIs will do far better.

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I think the answer is some combination of the following:

Ideas about the world, i.e., essays about one’s own opinionsFiction, like stories and suchArt, like screenplays or poems

…and that’s all I can think of. I’m sure I’m missing something.

But the point is, it will be deeply human things. Things that only you can make in that moment.

WebMD. Blinkest. Examine.com. Tech tutorials. Etc. Those are all wrecked. Mostly. Maybe you can write a tutorial in a way that feels more like essay or art, and still get away with it. But most won’t.

Next level

And here’s the crazier part. Nobody’s going to read that stuff. No people anyway. Your content will be consumed by APIs and AI assistants.

It’ll be parsed and/or baked into models. And it’ll be available if someone asks for it.

So if someone says, “What does Daniel Miessler think about using Purple Teams?”, their AI will be able to answer. But they won’t be navigating to my website to read it with their own eyes. Yuck. That’s so 2022.

We will produce ideas, opinions, and art. AIs will consume them and make them available to other AIs. And when humans want to know about a thing, their personal AI will tell them about it.

That’s the future we’re walking into. Not in 2027. Or 2025. Now.

It’s starting now.

Unmasking Money and Power with AI

In the age of information, the power dynamics that shape our society have become increasingly complex and opaque. The influence of money, status, and networking on politics and decision-making is often hidden from public view, leaving us with a distorted understanding of the forces at play. But with the advent of AI-powered software, we are on the cusp of a transparency revolution that will shed light on these connections and empower citizens to hold their leaders accountable.

AI-powered software, such as GPT and SPQA, is transforming the way we access and process information.

The key to this revolution lies in the ability of AI to process vast amounts of data and make it available for natural language questions. This is achieved through the use of context and questions, which allows AI to build a comprehensive understanding of a given subject and provide clear, concise answers to complex queries.

One particularly intriguing application of this technology is what we might call “Follow the Money.” This approach seeks to uncover the hidden connections between political actors, lobbyists, and donors, revealing the true extent of their influence on policy and decision-making.

AI has the potential to become the ultimate transparency tool.

Consider a hypothetical scenario: a congressman in Alabama is suspected of being influenced by the coal industry. Some claim he is in their pocket, while others vehemently deny it. The truth remains elusive, with arguments on both sides. But with AI-powered software, we can begin to build a clearer picture.

By gathering publicly available data on proposed legislation, political donations, and voting records, we can create a context for our AI to analyze. With this information, the AI can generate a list of prominent political issues, proposed legislation, donor positions, and the voting patterns of politicians.

Suddenly, we have a map of money’s influence on politics. We can see how much each congressperson has received from various donors and how their votes align with the interests of those donors.

The power of AI lies in its ability to process and analyze vast amounts of data, revealing previously hidden connections.

But the true strength of this AI-powered transparency tool lies in its ability to show its work. Every connection it makes can be backed up with a list of documents and evidence, ensuring that its conclusions are based on facts, not opinions. And with a chat interface, users can interrogate the system, ask questions, and explore the data in depth.

This level of transparency extends beyond politics, with the potential to address conspiracy theories and other hidden connections within society. By providing access to the relevant data and allowing users to ask questions of that knowledge, AI can help us see the true extent of influence and power dynamics at play.

In summary:

AI-powered software has the potential to revolutionize transparency in politics and society.By processing vast amounts of data, AI can reveal hidden connections and influences.The “Follow the Money” approach can help uncover the true extent of lobbying and donor influence on political decision-making.AI’s ability to show its work and provide evidence for its conclusions ensures that its findings are based on facts, not opinions.This transparency revolution has the potential to empower citizens and hold leaders accountable for their actions.NotesSPQA: State, Policy, Questions, and Action: — a new approach to software that combines AI with data analysis MORE