When you go through airport security, there's a line where the TSA agent checks your ID, and another line where a machine scans your bag. The same thing happens in enterprise security, but instead of passengers and luggage, it's end users and their devices. These days, most companies are pretty good at the first part of the equation where they check user identity, but user devices can roll right through authentication without getting inspected at all. In fact, 47% of
companies allow unmanaged, untrusted devices to access their data. That means an employee can log in from a laptop that has its firewall turned off and hasn't been updated in six months. Or worse, that laptop might be a bad actor using employee credentials. One password finally solves the device trust problem. One password ensures that no device can log
into your Okta protected apps unless it passes your security checks. Plus, you can use one password on devices without MDM, like your Linux fleet, contractor devices, and every BYoD phone and laptop in your company. Visit one password comm slash unsupervised learning to watch a demo and see how it works. That's one password.com/unsupervised learning. Welcome to Unsupervised Learning, a security I and meaning focused podcast that looks at how best
to thrive as humans in a post AI world. It combines original ideas, analysis, and mental models to bring not just the news, but why it matters and how to respond. All right. Welcome to unsupervised learning. This is Daniel Meisler and this is episode 431. This is RSA week. Got grok support coming to fabric. If you've not messed with grok yet you absolutely need to go do this. It
is insanely cool to use. It is so fast! I would love to do a demo, but we need to get through the show, so I'll probably do a demo in a separate talk or uh, little video soon. My buddy Clint Gibler and also Caleb Simon gave awesome talks at Bsides, so that's super cool. Be sure to check those out when they come out. I got a new essay here on how consultancies are about to move into departments and companies, and basically break them into pieces and
apply AI to them. I've been wanting to write this one for a very long time. It's called companies are a just a graph of algorithms, and I'm probably going
to record this as a standalone episode as well. Second new essay this week is how I think prompting is kind of the center of AI, and even though there's lots of cool stuff you could do with like fine tuning and training your own models and stuff, I think prompting is still where it's at, and this is kind of like an important walk through, or at least a decent walk through. On why I believe that, security wise, Biden administration is changing it so that you can they
can basically hire within it, and especially security. They can hire essentially people who don't have a degree, which has been a huge limiting factor for them to get talent. So that's really, really good news. The CEO of UnitedHealth took personal responsibility for paying the $22 million ransom to get business back running, and that is really interesting that
he did that. We'll see what the fallout is. I do worry a little bit about the signaling that it's basically saying, hey, it's okay to pay ransoms, which of course kind of propagates it. It's like, oh, we never negotiate with terrorists type of deal. That policy makes it so that people are less likely to become terrorists. So we'll see how that plays out. Satya Nadella sent out a Bill gates type memo saying that security was the top priority, which is cool to see history repeat itself there.
Cybersecurity consultancy got busted for trying to well, no, a consultant got busted for trying to extort an IT firm for $1.5 million by threatening to leak their secrets. Not the way to get what you want. Or maybe it is, I don't know. Verizon, AT&;T, T-Mobile and sprint got hit with a $200 million fine for selling customer location data. Oh, this is insane. A team trained a robot dog in a simulation. Completely in a simulation how to walk on
a ball. And then they took that code and put it in an actual robot dog and put it on an actual ball. And it just worked. I mean, think about how that's going to transfer to lots of different human problems. Google is pushing for a change to immigration policies. They basically say that we're losing AI and security talent because they're going to other countries. This is a tweet of mine about the difference between a company that uses back end models versus the whole company is actually the
back end model. So it's like, what's your vulnerability to getting sherlocked by someone like OpenAI or anthropic? And this is basically a breakdown for how you should actually build your company so that it just gets better when those things improve, it doesn't actually get replaced. I got a doctor buddy who loves AI note taking. She said she was basically going to give up and just get out of practicing medicine. And basically I note taking saved her
from doing that. So that's cool. Someone's criticizing Sam Altman's approach as a blend of fear, ignoring uncertainties and riding the hype wave. Apple is supposedly working on a big AI team, pulling people from Google and building up some sort of lab in Zurich. My buddy Joseph Thacker just wrote a great post on assumptions in Lm's assumptions made. This is the article you want to go check it out? It's, uh, really good. Somebody automated a YouTube shorts channel entirely entirely
with free tools. So it's a short book. Summaries is what it is, and it's just releasing episodes. It's doing the whole thing. It's just automation. Uh, really cool to go check that out, especially because it's book summaries, which are useful complexities, allure and simplicity is power. Basically, this article is arguing that simplicity is powerful, but complexity is
what actually sells and gets people excited. Uh, I'm I don't agree with that for myself, but I think the article made a pretty good case for it. 30 Useful concepts. So I just found like 27,500 asteroids in old telescope photos. And this is a good example of where you need AI because there aren't enough people, professionals actually looking at the sky with telescopes. There's just not enough people. There's not enough eyes, there's not enough experts. So this is
a perfect. For. I actually just having access to tons of different telescopes and then being able to just launch an alert if it sees one that looks big and it looks like it might be heading towards us, looks like we might have found a potential for extraterrestrial life by detecting a certain molecule. Looks like higher paid employees are struggling, which makes sense to me because. If you want to reduce how much you're paying in headcount, you
reduce the people first. That make the most. I've seen this personally multiple times for people around me. So definitely true. Got an interesting measurement of the economy, essentially how well strippers are doing and how much they're getting tipped. Is a good indicator or at least an interesting indicator. Number one metric for longevity continues. Every study I've seen about this, it's basically VO2 max. And this is yet another study
that's confirming that. Really cool essay. I didn't read it again, but I've read this like ten times. In Praise of Idleness by Bertrand Russell. And this one is really interesting. We got this woman here who is complaining about. Oh my God, they offered me. A help desk job. I keep getting these offers for help desk jobs, and then she proceeds to show off her two degrees. She's like, look at this degree and I have a second degree. Can't they see that I have these degrees? Why would
they be offering me a lowly help desk job? First of all, help desk people are awesome. InfoSec Taylor Swift was a help desk person. I know so many people who started on the help desk. My buddy Jason Powell started on the help desk and now he's doing amazing things at Apple. And it's like, look, you can't. First of all, you're demeaning a group of people who work in a field. So that's a problem. Second of all, it's not above you. And third of all, those degrees
don't actually mean anything for you, right? This is kind of the problem, right? She's in a heart for a hard time because. She believes that she's entitled to these things. I do want to mention, though, it's not her fault. It's the fault of the system for programming. And this is like the parents, this is the teachers, this is the whole school mechanism. And this tended to be more true in the past. Right? You put the work in, you pretty much get a job. It is just not
the case anymore. And it's definitely not the case now with AI, it was already the case before. I mean, 2022. It was not the case that a credential was good enough. You already needed to be special in some sort of way. So this was already a bad take, you know, back in 2022. And now it's even worse, way worse with AI because people like this who think that their homework and their the fact that they finished these classes is actually going to be valuable to that company by itself.
They're the ones who are going to get replaced by AI or just not hired at all. And this is another sort of thing around this. It's just like actually unrelated. But, um, it's basically if you're in tech and you're constantly dunking on AI, you should stop and you should think about this. AI is about to add billions or trillions of new, highly skilled and intelligent workers to the economy. And I mean,
this is what's going to happen, right? And I've got a whole whole vibe here, but I'm not going to read the whole thing. Basically, the takeaway is that something about AI might be putting you off. Maybe it's like
the fanboys, maybe it's the fan. The fact that it might sound to you like crypto or NFTs, you need to push that aside and like, push away the fact that you're you're turned off for some reason about this, because if you were turned off about driving or turned off about reading or writing it, just because somebody was going crazy with CrossFit around reading and writing or reading and writing, it's the best thing driving. It's the best thing. And when you saw those people talk, it annoyed you
and you're like, you know what? Because of those people, I'm not going to learn how to read, write or drive. That's what you're doing with AI. That is what you're doing with AI. And guess what? It's not hurting them. It's going to hurt you. So that's why I'm saying here. That's the point of this one. And the recommendation of the week is my three minute video for how to Build a meaningful life. It's pretty cool. It's like three
minutes 30s. And the aphorism of the week is one's destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things. One's destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things. Henry Miller Unsupervised Learning is produced and edited by Daniel Miller on a Neumann U87 AI microphone using Hindenburg. Intro and outro music is by zombie with the why and to get the text and links from this episode, sign up for the newsletter version
of the show at Daniel meisler.com/newsletter. We'll see you next time.