UL NO. 434: Can You Articulate Yourself in 50 Words?

One of the most important things for surviving AI is being able to articulate what you do, or even better, who you are. So I was at a party with a bunch of like, high net worth people, like muckety mucks like important people. And somebody asked me, I was at RSA, so people have asked me this like 20 times over the course of the week. They asked me what I did and I told them I built AI stuff and they just looked at me like, oh, you're an asshole. Basically, like I was trying to be cool.

And it's like, I am seriously not trying to be cool. I'm trying to say a small amount, which maybe spawns a conversation if they're like, oh yeah, really? What kind of AI or something? But I don't want to go into some sales pitch of like, oh, I'm building AI that blah blah, blah blah does this. But it was just like not landing. It didn't land for me. It didn't land for them. It just wasn't good. So I think I'm basically going to answer differently from now on.

I'm going to start with the problems. So I'm basically worried about two problems people having a lack of meaning in their lives and AI making that worse when their jobs go away. So what I do is I use AI to build products and services that help people and companies create a version of themselves that will not just survive, but will thrive after AI is everywhere. And I could say that in multiple different ways, but it starts with I'm worried about two problems, so I'm building these things

to solve them. So that's basically like my new spiel. And I like this for a few different reasons. One, it starts with the problems. Two, it highlights that I'm building. It mentions AI, which is good to mention, and it is actually what I'm doing, and it puts meaning as the most important piece even above AI. So I like it for all these different reasons. But I think the most screwed people right now are those who don't know themselves, right?

They don't know what they're about, they don't have a purpose they can't articulate, like why they get up in the morning and what they're driving towards, or why they do the job that they're doing other than, well, I it's just the job I have or whatever. So my recommendation know yourself and be able to articulate that thing. So I ran this through the create five sentence summary fabric pattern. And it ended up with this helping people

find meaning in the AI era. Empowering human potential with AI, AI for human flourishing, meaningful AI solutions, and AI powered meaning. Not too bad. So my work network Chuck, my buddy Chuck here just posted the most amazing video about fabric. It was just absolutely, insanely good. I've been waiting for this thing to drop for a couple of months now, and so he basically captures this spirit of the project in such a fantastic way. He just really gets the

concept of it how it's human. First, he mentions it multiple times, he pulls multiple quotes out. He's got us talking about it in an interactive way there. It's just unbelievably good. And it's a pretty long video. And he walks through all sorts of use cases. Highly recommend that one. Security. Looks like we're going to have a cyber force similar

to the Space Force. Chinese linked hackers are using things called orbs, which are basically these hop networks that they can bounce through for hiding, spying, and a bunch of other shenanigans. Fixed problems instead of doing risk measurement theatre. I came up with that title, but Andy Ellis wrote this piece. Quite cool. This piece actually. Short. Sweet. Yeah. Really good. Highly recommend it. Run some AI against it if you don't want to read that. But yeah, really good.

Got a bug cloud? No, a cloud related bug. Linguistic lumberjack. Pretty cool alliteration there. Issue with Fluentbit. And basically it's got 3 billion downloads and it's yeah all sorts of systems. So another supply chain issue American criminal records exposed 70 million rows of American criminal record in a database somewhere. So Russia evidently launched some sort of space weapon capable

of attacking satellites. And they're saying that it's close to a particular one, same orbit as a US government satellite posing a direct threat. And of course, Russian said Russia said fake news. Not true, which I believe. And why wouldn't you believe him? Like why would they lie? That's the thing. I breaks into a tech giant. So X-Force from IBM, they've been around forever. They've been around like

they were around when I got started, I think. And they got a new AI hacking platform, and they use it to attack some major tech manufacturers network, and they got in around eight hours. Question is, how much human involvement was there or was it like completely automated? That would be impressive. They haven't released this tool yet, but eager to hear more about it. Tesla's can still be hacked.

I believe these were model threes, but. A buddy, Malwaretech Marcus Hutchins did a demo of this on his TikTok. Pretty easy to get into these cars still, even though they switched to wideband to try to get around this, I believe. But yeah, it still works. Not sure if it works on model wise. Preliminary report on the Baltimore Bridge looks like unexpected structural weaknesses. So not cyber like so many people said immediately. Core issue with Wi-Fi with

lack of Ssid authentication during beaconing. Okay, got a US woman and four others charged in a scheme using fake IT jobs to get lots of money into North Korea's nuclear program. 60 identities and 300 companies US companies. Insane. NYPD is rolling out drones to respond to 911 calls. I am happy about this, but only because I like sci fi technology. You. The EU passed its AI act,

and I've got a summary here. I'm not going to read all ten of these points, but the fines up to 7% of worldwide turnover, that's a pretty hefty fine. Probably not going to be ignored as much as other regulation. Oh, the other key point, because I read a whole bunch of this thing, was that they tried to support innovation, so they didn't go like crazy Europe on it with like just more and more regulation. They actually have a regulation in here that says you can't impose other regulation.

So they wanted to avoid this getting out of control, which I thought was smart of them. And when your AI sounds too much like Scarlett Johansson. So I have opinions on this. So basically Sam tweeted out her, okay, so it was pretty obvious that they wanted this thing to sound like the movie, right? So they reached out to a voice actress who sounded like Scarlett, and then they reached out to actual Scarlett Johansson. Real Scarlett Johansson said no. So they're like, okay, we're going to go

with the other one. They already I don't know if they had tweeted out her before or after that, but it was obviously they were going in that direction. I don't think this is horribly malicious. Like if you've ever worked inside of one of these companies, especially at like the leadership level, there is mass chaos. You might have marketing talking about something. You might have someone on your

leadership team who, like, was approved to say something. But they said the thing that was different than the actual message. There could be miscommunication here. So yeah, I don't think it's malicious, but somebody was bringing up. Look, it's not Scarlett Johansson. You can hire somebody who sounds like somebody else, no big deal. And I had a tweet somewhere. It was like, you're not allowed to deepfake people using real humans. That's still a deepfake. Not technically. It's not technically a

deepfake because it's not AI. It's a real person. But the point is to copy someone else. And I'm sure there's precedent for this all over the place. Already on the books. It's like if I hire somebody who looks exactly like whoever, um, the Rock, Dwayne Johnson or whatever, and I'm like, yeah, I'm claiming to be him or no, I just call the app the Stone, and it's like the Rock's voice, but it's like, no, I didn't know it was the Rock, and I. What are you talking about?

I don't even know who the rock is. But you hire a person who sounds just like him, and the app is called the Stone. Then you tweet out, rocks are cool, that come on, there's got to be a precedent for that. So they're going to get smashed if that does go to court. I wish it just wouldn't. Right? I mean, I'm trying to look at positives here. Like Sam is trying to do a cool thing. Okay. It's

like her is awesome, I love her. I've got a video about this where I'm like, hey, look, you could talk to Samantha from the movie her and I'm breaking down, like how you can use that with Siri and Shortcuts and everything. So it's like so obvious and it's so cool. And it's also cool for Scarlett to be able to say, yeah, you know what? Not me. Can't do that. So anyway,

it's a legal issue. I'm not sure what the actual precedent says, but yeah, hiring someone who sounds just like Scarlett and pretending it didn't happen, that's not the game. Looks like Apple tried to get all of TSMC's two nanometer chips stock skyrocketing 262%, $26 billion. They're about to be worth more than Apple, which is ridiculous. And I think Scott Galloway was quoting some stats of like, it's Nvidia at this point is worth more than like the

economy of Germany or something. Just ridiculous numbers. And I think we're just starting with AI, so I don't see how someone's going to catch up before, who knows how high Nvidia is going to go, but I feel like they got a massive lead and everyone's going to be trying to get in. AI is just starting. People are talking about plateaus. I think they're absolutely insane. So yeah, exciting times. Looks like we found some lithium in the US.

Massive untapped lithium source Microsoft is reimagining windows with a deep dive into AI, introducing copilot NPCs that blend cutting edge AI features directly into the operating system. People are saying, hey, nobody wants this. Well, yeah, they actually do. Once everyone has the ability to remember everything they've done on their computer, remember every screen, and they could just talk to their computer and be like, hey, where was that one email? Hey,

am I missing a thing? Hey, keep me up to date. Hey, make a list of this. Hey, send a list of this to all my friends. Hey, show me the most important things I should be taking a look at. Hey, reprioritize my work. Hey, rewrite this document for me. And when I say rewrite this document for me, it knows that I'm looking at the screen and it knows what document I'm looking at. So it just rewrites it and it's like, ah, not so much. Make it less formal.

Boom rewrites it less formal. Okay, send it out to all my directs or whatever. Boom sends it out. Once you're interacting with a computer like that and you have all of your history available, this is like I said in my AI prediction video, everyone's going to want this, and they're going to demand it. And what it requires is everything being recorded all the time, all your screens, all your conversations. Trust me, it's happening. It's going to happen.

There's nothing that's going to stop that. There's nothing's going to slow it down. It is too powerful and too awesome. Now, will there be security issues? Oh yes. So many security issues. And they will be horrible because it will be your whole entire soul getting compromised when that stuff gets leaked. Right. It's every text message that came through everything. A little pop pop up, someone sent you a dirty joke or whatever, or you sent somebody else a dirty joke that's also recorded.

That's also captured by AI. That's somewhere. Now it's in some law document somewhere. Because guess what? Lawyers get access to that and everything. I mean, it's going to be crazy world we're about to move into. But I tell you, the downsides are not going to slow it down in the slightest because the upsides are going to be so powerful.

Mapping AI's inner universe. This is really cool. Anthropic released a paper on sonnet, which is their medium level model, and basically showed how it thought essentially basically a lot more transparency for AI, which has been traditionally opaque with neural nets. China released a chatbot called Ask President XI, and it allows citizens to ask Prachi how to be better socialists. Fantastic. I bet that's flying off the shelf. Astronomers are preparing to use AI to tackle 300PB of

data annually. Yeah. Watch this guy. Find some stuff. Make sure rocks don't hit us. Windows 11 Powertoys allows you to transform AI transform clipboard content into different formats or languages with a simple shortcut. Love it and it uses OpenAI. Cool. No problem. Microservices might be all the rage, but this thing basically says use modules instead of microservices. Interesting. X is getting rid of public likes, so you can't get

in trouble for liking somebody who's controversial. You'll still be able to see when someone likes your stuff, and you'll still be able to see your own likes, but you won't be able to see other people's. You won't be able to see someone who you hate and see a third person who liked their stuff. That's what you won't be able to see. And Elon basically thinks that this is going to increase the number of likes. And I

think he's probably right about that. Focusing on fundamentals over frameworks could be the secret sauce for long lasting tech skills. Agree with this. This was a good essay. Shows you how to use ghidra for crafting gdb scripts that trace function calls helping with vulnerability, hunting D3 in-depth guides. Love me some D3. Really powerful library experts JS simplifies creating multi-agent AI systems. Starting to get pretty turned off by

AI agent systems. Honestly, I'm heading down the path of just building all my own stuff, and that's what I'm doing with substrate. So getting away from the agent frameworks, I think just a lot of really cool stuff in demos and not usable in production. That's what I'm finding. And I think everyone's finding that who's actually building user persona generator prompts simulates user interviews to create detailed user personas, saving you from conducting dozens of real interviews. Yeah, wait

till you see what AI is going to hiring. Oh yeah, that's what we're about to talk about. Job seekers are struggling to find work and employers can't seem to fill positions. Paradox. It is not a mystery. The problem is hiring managers need people ready to do the job and they don't

want to train anyone. This is why degrees are mattering less, and why somebody with an active tech blog or YouTube channel who's actually building stuff and doing the thing can get hired with no credentials over someone with a degree in computer science, or two degrees, or a master's degree or a PhD. The ability to actually do the thing is all that matters now. Expect to see AI services soon.

Now look at a person's social media blog, YouTube, whatever, and then do an interactive interview with them and give a score of how likely they are to do a good job at this job. This will cut through all the credentials, all the fluff, all sorts of other BS and get at the real thing. The value of traditional education will drastically fall because of this. Like pay attention

to this. The value of traditional education will drastically fall as a result of this, because degrees won't significantly raise these scores for most people. This is something this controversial point. I used to think that it was all about expose people to the training and they will get better, and you just need better training. If they're not moving, you

give them better training. Turns out that's not it. It's actually something inside the person that if they are that person who's going to be awesome, it doesn't take much to prompt them or to stimulate them into their curiosity, which just makes them a voracious reader and learner and studier. And all of a sudden, boom, they shoot out of the thing. That's why the help desk is so good

at finding talent, because it's a wide filter. There's so many people on Help Desk, but there's somebody on help desk who, the moment they sat on the tier one floor, they immediately like started answering all the questions for everyone else. Boom! They become tier two, boom. They become tier three. And before long, if they have the right networking or whatever, they go into networking, they go into sysadmin, or they go into programming or they go into security or something,

and they shoot off and they become a star. And an experienced person could have seen them at tier one in tech and just been like, oh, that's a star right there. First of that is that there are people who come in with two degrees, go to tier one, you send them to Harvard, the best training, the best everything, and they can't even move into tier two. They're there

for six years. And when they see a problem that they've seen a million times, they call their manager or they ask the person next to them, and that is a function of them versus the other person. Now. And there's lots of people in between what this is going to do. And this is here's two extremes here. Lots of education, little ability to do the thing practically and technically versus somebody who doesn't have much training at all. Right.

No exposure to the stuff, no networking, no connections. And they're just voracious. They just what? Oh, how do you do that? Whoa whoa whoa whoa. And they just jump into it and jump all over it. And they learn the stuff instantly and they're like, oh, you can just code that. Oh, well, what's the name of that Python? Oh, okay. I guess I'll go learn Python. They come back, they're like, hey, I wrote a program to do that. It's like, when did you learn Python? Oh, I didn't, I just looked on.

I watched a couple of YouTube videos. I wrote a program. Some people are like that and some people are the opposite of that. This is what I is good at. It's going to be able to tell you the difference between those. So guess what? You're going to be able to filter through tens, hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of resumes, find people like that, send them into an additional filter, which is like a live interview with like an AI avatar or whatever. It runs them through scenarios, sees how

curious they are. It's going to find the magic sauce, the same magic sauce that I'm talking about right now. The AI is going to find that magic sauce. It's going to give them a score, and they're going to shoot to the top. And guess what? Everyone's going to go hire those people. Nobody wants to hire a new person. Nobody wants to train new people. This is why there is the gap in hiring. This is why so many people are getting out of college, can't find a job.

It's because they're like, hey, look, I've got my degrees. Can't wait to do my training so you can teach me how to do my job. And the hiring manager is like, yeah, so about that, we're busy. We don't have time to train anybody, so we won't be hiring you. We will be hiring Caleb, who is a 15 year old who is doing this job already and has been for three years in between playing video games. And that's who we're going to hire instead of you with your

master's degrees. So it'll filter for drive, curiosity, obsession, and proof of work like actual builders and coders and people who raise insightful questions that are curious. This is going to spawn a completely new type of education dedicated to making more people like the stars that I'm talking about, because a lot of the people who are dull in this way that I'm talking about, they were just let down by their maybe it's genetic, maybe they're just not

as smart. Of course, there are smarter, less smart people, but I think a lot of this is cultural where you have they were just not given curiosity as a thing as they were growing up. And this is another opportunity for AI to change that education and not teach them. Oh, it's about what you can remember and instead teach them. It's about what you find interesting, right? Get that curiosity into them early, then expose them to modules of training

instead of stupid curricula. Tough times for new grads. Okay, same point. Yeah, see above. And of course this is not the only factor, but yeah, hitting a wall with entry level hiring projected to drop by 5.8% in 24. Yeah, wait till you see 25 and 26 and 27. It's going to get nastier. Software engineer positions on indeed have plummeted 30% from pre-pandemic levels. Even with all this stuff considered, I still don't understand that number. That's ridiculous. That's got

to be some macroeconomic stuff. I'll have to talk to Mike about that. I don't know all the inputs coming in. I think the thing I'm describing is one of those inputs, but I don't know how that accounts for 30%. So obviously multifactorial is college overrated? Nearly 30% of Americans are questioning the value of college, according to a recent Pew poll. Once again, see above. Job hopping not just flaky, but strategic. Yeah, yeah, I wrote this here. You're wondering why I say I

wrote this. I helps with this sometimes. Write some of these sentences. Some portion of this could be I written a lot of these I write myself or I have to go and edit them just because I don't like what the AI writes. So I have to do it myself. Like I had to write this whole thing. I think not because they're flaky, but because they're in search of a culture that matches their drive. Sticking it out in a toxic work environment can dole a high performance edge.

I think that might be I right there. Can't actually remember. My AI is getting so good that. A it actually copies me pretty well. I definitely write everything in the blue. 100% yeah. So here's my main point for truly top performers. It's not bad to see them jump every 3 to 4 years. Hiring managers know they get bored quickly and that they can probably solve a bunch of problems, and then they just leave because they want to solve a new challenge.

And plus they got a little bit of their stock payout. I know tons of people like this, like star programmers, and they just bounce around and nobody really cares because they're just happy to have them when they show up. It doesn't work for the whatever. 30 years ago IBM employee, they'll be like, oh, you left after seven years, why are your pants on fire or whatever? All right. So now they're saying avoiding the sun might actually be a risk factor. Yeah. So get too much sun. You'll die.

Don't get enough sun. You'll die. Punchline. You'll die. I definitely believe this. I think there's value to this whole like, get sun touch grass thing grounding. Get in touch with nature, whatever. Yeah, definitely true for me, anecdotally and possibly anecdotally as well. I think we need more science on this. More people are doing marijuana than drinking now. I guess we could take that as a win. That drinking is down because Uberman said alcohol is poison. He also went pretty hard

on cannabis as far as I can remember. Psychedelics as painkillers. Yeah, this is getting a lot of press. One third of Amazon warehouse workers are on food stamps or Medicaid. That is not a good number one file to rule them all. One massive, sprawling text file I am in favor of. Text. Text is my favorite. I love large files, broken down, markdown bullets. Super clear, easy to read. I love this whole vibe, and I'm using it for fabric and managing

my own internal context and everything. US Justice Department is gearing up to dismantle the Live Nation Ticketmaster giant. Hallelujah! So overdue. And thank you for Taylor Swift, because I think she had something to do with this. California is getting over a quarter of its energy from sun soared. Finding is not what you think. An argument from one expert claiming everything we know about sword fighting is bad. It's my favorite Paul Graham essay. Great work happens by

focusing consistently on something you're genuinely interested in. I love this sentence. When you pause to take stock, you're surprised how far you've come. Paul Graham is one of my favorite essayists ever, and this is one of my favorite ones. I think it's called Great Work or How to Do Great Work is the name of the essay should have

linked it here. This rhymes with a realization I've been having lately that the best leaders and founders have something in common, which is like we were talking about before, actually obsession. It's not that they're disciplined, or they might be, and they probably are, but they just might be obsessed, which tends to look a lot like discipline because they both produce consistent effort in a uniform direction. I find myself increasingly looking for people who are obsessed with things,

life and idea, whatever. They can't stop thinking about it. And the million different ideas they have tend to revolve around that same concept. It's one that my buddy Joel Paris sent me the link to. This is cool. Nostalgia tends to peak at a single age, and I think this is either Pew or Gallup. I mix the two up, but if you draw the line, it's somewhere like right here, and that's around 15. Yeah, 15 years old, 18 years

old or whatever. And guess what? The most close knit community is the most moral society, the least political division, the happiest families, the most reliable news reporting. It all happens when you're 18 years old. So regardless of your age, whenever you were 18, that's when you think the Golden Age was brilliant. Data visualization recommendation of the week. Become able to articulate who you are and what you're about in 25 to 50 words. And the aphorism of the

week fall seven times. Stand up eight, fall seven times. Stand up eight. Japanese proverb. Unsupervised Learning is produced and edited by Daniel Meisler 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.