UL NO. 468 | TELOS Patterns, Apple 0-Day, Gumroad Replaces Developers with AI

So it's used by a lot of different models. And basically what pickle is, is it's a Python library for parsing model files. Essentially it's a parser, right? It's a parsing library. And everyone knows in security that parsing is the root of all evil. So what they figured out is that the scanning system, the security software for hugging face would basically break. If you get over a certain size or if you have like a broken file. So what they figured out is that somebody had actually embedded

malware in a couple of these models. And this kind of breaks people's brains because you think essentially that if you're running a local model, it's safe, right? That that's what everyone has been saying. If you run a local model, it's completely safe. It's the services that are dangerous, right. Like the deep seek service obviously that's in China, so it's dangerous. But if it's a local model, it's fine. What they found was look, it's still software, right? Running

a model is still software. You have a parsing library involved if it's a pickle file based model. And yeah, they were basically able to find malware inside of this thing that was trying to dial home. It was trying to dial home to an IP address inside of China. So really, really cool finding and it's going to be in the newsletter next week. But in the meantime, you can get it from this URL right here. They they're calling the attack nullify which is pretty good name. Nullify nullify.

And yeah it nullifies I guess hugging face security. So yeah that was that was cool. All right. Continuing down here. Oh yeah. We did the augmented version three. We talked about Telos Files. This was last Friday. It was a great class. Best of the three. It was definitely the best of the three courses in my opinion went a full four hours. It was quite good. The next one I think is going to be online, although I said

that for the last one. Um, so it might be another live class but haven't announced that one yet, so don't worry about that. Um, going back to roots on the story format here. So I'm basically if a story is only one sentence, It's going to be one sentence. I went back and looked at a whole bunch of my old episodes where I just felt really comfortable with doing that writing, and I was surprised at how short a lot of the things were. I would just be like, hey, yeah,

this thing happened. I think it's kind of cool because of this reason. Boom, whatever. That's like 12 words or whatever. And I had a link in boom, that was it. And I'm just going to kind of go back to that.

I've been so I focused, I want to write more because I could use AI to help with summarizing, but I want to focus more on manual writing of that first sentence and use the AI more to like, gather data and gather support and sources for the sentence that I write myself, which I'm already writing a whole lot of the sentence, but I just want to start from scratch and write the sentence completely myself, which is how I was doing it, obviously going back to 2015. So

that's a little bit of a change there. Uh, put a bunch of new fabric patterns focusing on analyzing your Telos file. And this is part of the the the course just put out. And they all start with t underscore. So if you look for those patterns those are telos oriented. Um yeah. Had some loud music in my raycast video. I'm re-uploading that I've been talking to the team about it.

Sometimes you might hear in the podcast edit, you're never supposed to hear that the team is supposed to take that and edit that out, which is why I say the word. So I've had some talks with the team and they are working on fixing that. But apologies in the meantime. And yeah, I had some shenanigans with an automated post to my X account a few days ago, and it turns out it was like an automated like Twitter application that looks like it might have been compromised

on the back end. Maybe it not sure exactly, but yeah, it was really kind of weird. And I got an email out to the security team to see if they want to fix it. See, what have we got here? Um, someone's using 2.8 million. This is under security. 2.8 million IPS. To brute force the passwords of basically every type of VPN and firewall device out there, and most of the IPS are in Brazil, but lots of other countries as well.

Apple just patched another zero day that Citizens Lab says was being used in extremely sophisticated, targeted attacks against specific journalists and dissidents. Ken Wong from CSA released a detailed framework called maestro. And the thing that this does, it's a threat modeling framework, but it's specifically focused on AI agents, and it's addressing gaps in things like stride and pasta and other frameworks that just were pre AI. So they

don't really handle AI that well. Uh, also uh, deals with emerging threats like goal misalignment, model extraction, adversarial attacks, stuff like that. And researchers at Watchtower discovered 150 abandoned around 150 abandoned S3 buckets used by a whole bunch of software companies like governments. Romance, various types of infrastructure pipelines.

And the concern is if those S3 buckets and the artifacts, the assets inside of those S3 buckets are being consumed as part of a pipeline, well, that's ripe for a supply chain attack. Cloudflare had a significant outage because someone tried to block a phishing URL, accidentally turned off their entire R2 storage, which R2 is basically S3. It's cloudflare's answer to S3. And yeah, Cloudflare always has really good postmortems,

so you definitely want to check that one out. While ARM released a report on API security that includes a bunch of stats on AI services that use APIs, and the big takeaway for me, which I kind of already believed is AI security right now is largely API security, and with the caveat being that it's AI API security, so that your API has to be strong because that's like that's the parsing system for going into your application.

But the added twist with AI is it's not only API security, it's also whatever is being consumed through that API. You also have the problem of prompt injection. And prompt injection can like travel and like detonate multiple times or get stored and detonate later. It's kind of like a stored cross-site scripting type of vibe, except for it's even more nuanced because it's English and it can detonate at multiple levels, and different parsers can detonate the content differently, right?

It could be that you have like a five layer nested prompt injection attack, and maybe some systems peel off two of the layers, or some systems peel off only one of the layers. Some systems peel off four of the layers, but the fifth one gets through. So there's a lot of extra complexity because you're using English to try to trick systems. But big, big focus, however, on

AI security or API security with AI security. Ex-google engineers facing espionage charges for passing confidential IP to China, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania just cut their last major tie to Russia by switching their power grids from Soviet era systems to the European continental network. That is great to see that independence happening. And a bunch of Russian drone operators were attacked with kind of like that, um, Hezbollah attack where they attacked the pagers, but they were receiving booby

trapped headsets. But the problem was when they opened up the packages which they were going to use, the packaging was not perfect. And because the packaging was not perfect, they they detected tampering and they were like, hey, something is weird here. And of course, they probably thought of the Hezbollah situation and they did not use them, but if they did, it could have been similar to like the Hezbollah attack where a bunch of Russian drone operators

get killed or injured from modified headsets. I in tech, Gumroad says they're no longer hiring junior or mid-level engineers because AI is handling most of that work. Now, this is colossal. And also this is not an AI company. So Salesforce said something like this. But Salesforce also makes agents for or what is that thing called agent Force or something like that. It's they have their own product.

So when the head of Salesforce says, hey, you know, we don't even need engineers because our product is so awesome that maybe it's true, maybe it's marketing. In this case, this is just a regular company. Gumroad they're saying they are not hiring junior or mid-level engineers anymore. The only people they're going to hire are senior people, senior devs,

or senior architects who are really good with AI. I've been saying this since very early 23, like February of 23 and so have a lot of other people, right? I'm not the only one. It's it's kind of obvious where this is heading, right. And you get into a real big problem with like the pipeline. But at the

same time this seems a little bit extreme. It seems like they might be overstating their case, because I do know the current state of AI agents, and it's not quite at the level of replacing fully replacing junior engineers. I don't know, in some tasks you can mid-level engineers? I don't think so. I don't I don't think so. Not right now. Not in February of 25. Maybe in two months, maybe in six months, maybe in a year,

maybe inside of 2025. Yes. And of course, the details are nuanced based on the use case, but I would say junior engineers maybe, but not quite. Mid-level engineers? No, and definitely not senior engineers. So I think this might be a little bit padded, but, um, yeah, I would say there's a lot of daylight between these tools and a human developer with 105 IQ. There really is there's a there's a lot of daylight between those two things still in February of 25. So one of Chatgpt's main architects,

John Schulman, left anthropic after only five months. And the rumor is he's going to join Mira at her AI startup. I'm not sure if that actually happened, but seems like a lot of people are leaving both anthropic and OpenAI to go work with Mira. Uh, new demo shows OpenAI assistant giving remarkably natural sales calls, handling objections and questions. Yeah, if you're a mediocre salesperson, you should be afraid. You should be afraid and either do something else or get not. Mediocre.

Anthropic released an anthropic economic index report on how AI is being used in the workforce. They see 36% of people use AI for at least a quarter of their tasks. Interesting. Good report. I like the content coming out of anthropic. I feel like their their paper about like how we view agents really good essays. I like the essay that came out from the CEO Dario. Yeah, I like the thought leadership that they're putting out in addition to their models, by the way. A new model is supposed to be

coming out from anthropic. I would have bet money that it would have been in January. Not a lot of money. I would have put it at 70 or 80% chance of it being in January. So I am quite surprised that they have not released a new model family, or just an update to sonnet or opus or haiku or whatever. I think they're probably going to do a big family upgrade,

maybe even a new family. I think they're going to do something big, but I thought they would have wanted to do it in January, so I'm surprised that it's not out yet, but the rumor is basically that it is coming soon, maybe in the next couple of weeks. Lee Robinson says AI is finally enabling truly personal software,

where people can build exactly what they need without extra bloat. 100% agreed their LinkedIn is testing an AI tool where you just talk to the interface about what you're looking for, and it returns results. Another way to say this is like LinkedIn is working on an interface that everyone's going to have soon. Like so many people, especially developers are just talking to like cursor or to Visual Studio or to whatever AI tool. You just talk to it and it's like it figures out what you mean and it

just starts working. All software is going to be like that, right? Um, in my opinion, you're going to be talking to your, uh, your own AI model and it's going to be the interface to this tool. But you could also talk to the tool directly in the meantime, because we don't have full Das yet. but it seems obvious that voice is going to become more and more of our interface to things.

Because as nice as a keyboard is, and we'll still use the keyboard for some things, and some people will prefer the keyboard, but it is friction compared to just talking, especially when there's lots of back and forth and stuff like that. Chick fil A is using drones to fly over, study and optimize their drive thrus, helping them achieve the highest per restaurant revenue in the US. So they got an aerial film studies unit, and it helped one location

boost drive thru sales by 50% in 2022. So they've got a new Atlanta location serving 700 cars per hour. If you ever go there during a rush, it's like it disrupts traffic on the street outside. So now they got drones flying over like optimizing the thing. Mad respect to chick fil A. Mad respect to chick fil A. They're just like, yeah, they know how to run a business. Same with In-N-Out, right? Same kind of vibe. Like really focused on optimization. Apple's making a smart home display called

the home Pad. Basically a seven inch square display. Um, also, there's a big announcement coming out. When is it? The 19th. Apple is teasing some kind of big product. So it might actually be this might actually be this. It's like a seven inch square display that you put different places in the house. So it's like a touch display for managing your, your home. So it could be that or it could be like a new surprise product. Not sure

what that's going to be. Uber is in a weird spot because they're just the middleman between users and a service like Waymo. So if you're anywhere near San Francisco, you're coming to visit or you live there, you should be using Waymo. Waymo is way better. Uber is just it's amazing. It's absolutely great. Car comes and picks you up. There's no driver. It's extremely safe. It's like the best driver you've ever seen. It's way better than a human Uber driver. Probably better than you as a driver or

me as a driver. It's just extraordinarily high quality. And the question is, if Waymo gets big and becomes the big thing, why wouldn't you just have the Waymo app like I do? I don't I why would I use the Uber app to call Waymo? Now one answer is maybe I just want one app. And if it's the same user experience or better, then I would use the one app. But the problem is if you have a DoorDash app and you have a Waymo app, those are direct lines into the thing. I will tell you the

answer though. I'll tell you the answer, which is going to be one or 2 or 3 years out, which is you won't need any of those because your single interface, going back to the previous point, your single interface will be your Da, your digital assistant will be the single interface. So you won't be calling Waymo. This is what people don't realize. This is the book that I wrote in 2016. I don't talk about the book enough. I should talk about it. I literally predicted this stuff in the book

in 2016, which is why I wrote the book. It's kind of a crappy book, honestly. It's more like a structured blog post. It's very short, but I literally wrote it down because I saw it so clearly, including the AI stuff, including the Da stuff, and it just seems logical to me. It seemed logical to me then. It seems logical to me now. There won't be a Waymo app, or they there will be, but it will be a Waymo API. Companies become APIs, okay? Companies become APIs. That

is what's going to happen. Waymo is just an API. Uber is just an API. If I go to the corner and I have had a few Moscow mules with Tito's, Which is my go to drink, and, um, I'm not driving. My car is right there, but I'm not going to drive because I've had too much to drink, and, um, I need to go home. I'm going to say to my da, give me a ride home. It is then going to look at all the different services it's going. First of all, it might know that I have a preference,

but anyway, it has all the different things available. All the cab companies have an API, Uber has an API, Waymo has an API. Maybe there's a competitor to Waymo, maybe it's BYD. Hopefully it isn't. But let's say there's a Chinese competitor. Oh, Tesla. Tesla will have an API because there will be Tesla auto driving cars as well. So that's a competitor to Waymo. All these things have an API. My Da knows my preferences. It knows what I like inside the car. It knows the cars that

I like. It knows when I got angry about an experience before. It's judging all those things based on my current AI I state it's selecting from which one. Also, it could be which one can get to here the fastest. Maybe it's raining. Maybe I need a car immediately. And a car is literally like 100ft away from me and it can pick me up in 30s. Maybe it selects that, but it makes the choice for me. I literally say I literally walk out of the thing and I say,

give me a ride home. And 28 seconds later, a car stops and opens up and says, hey, Daniel, um, I'm here to take you home. And it's an automated car. It's autonomous and it takes me home. I did not pick up my phone. I did not open an application. That is ridiculous. That is ridiculous. I will not be opening apps. I will be talking to my da. My da is the proxy. It is my interface to the world.

My da is looking around at San Francisco at the millions and millions of demons which are APIs for objects, including the objects which are businesses. It has the ability to see and read and interpret and manipulate and interface with all of those millions of APIs to create the best possible experience for me, which in this case involves getting me home quickly while not driving drunk. That's it. If you think about the future of AI and the future of tech, this is the biggest thing that nobody's

talking about because they haven't figured it out yet. They just haven't figured this out yet. Like, it's I don't see anybody talking about it yet. I keep talking about it every once in a while, like I am now, but in a couple of years, people are going to be like, you know what? I tell you what? You know, it's going to be cool. Everything's going to have some sort of interface. And then the AI on the individual's device is going to interact with those services on behalf

of the user. And I'm going to be like, yeah, yeah, that's exactly what's going to happen. And the next piece on top of that, okay, I'm just going to pull it up. The next piece on top of that is going to be the interface. Okay. What's this thing called invoking raycast. Going to do this real quick. Digital assistants. Step one digital assistants are personal AIS know everything about us and they are everything to us. That is our single interface. Then two everything gets an API, which is

a demon or an aura or an API. Whatever we want to call that, I will call it a demon for a person, which is Greek for soul. Three our Das will mediate everything. This is the point that I was just making. We'll say what we want in our Das will manipulate external demons APIs to make it happen, for our Das will become our active advocates and defenders. They will actively monitor, filter and manipulate the world to protect us, to advocate on our behalf. Okay. That's four.

And millions of examples in here. You should definitely go read this one. I'll try to link to it somewhere. And five A thriving ecosystem of Da modules. These Da modules are the APIs. The companies become the APIs. The companies are the APIs. The companies put themselves into the world via the APIs. Six AR interfaces show us the demons around us through an interface that our Da is providing us. So some companies will provide the filters through

which we see the demons. So for example, this filter that my Da is using, let's say it's from a company called chroma. Okay. This company called chroma displays people's demons in really cool, colorful ways. That's the only thing this company does. So my Da knows that I like to use the chroma interface. So when I walk around and I see people's demons, this girl, for example, this girl is super creative. She's hyper creative. And the chroma interface when it reads a demon. When my da reads

a demon, it reads her demon. We're in a Starbucks. I look over at this girl. This is what I see in my visor. This is what I see in my apple glasses, or my meta glasses or my Google glasses. Whatever the company is, this is what I see. I see this glowing fire around this girl and I'm like, Holy crap, she must be an artist. She must be like a musician. She's like on fire with like, creativity.

My Da knew that because it read the thing, but most importantly, it went through the filter of the chroma interface, and that's what made the display inside of my visual. Inside of my. Ah, right. So some people don't want to see this. They want to see a more tech version. They want to see a more minimalist version. They want to see a green outline for creative people or whatever. Right.

So those filters are themselves separate companies with separate APIs and software that run on the, ah, interface, etc.. Right. So it's all this giant marketplace of filters and demons and companies that are available to me. Right. And if I go back up here, look, this is where the the this is all the demons. I can't read that. That is millions of demons literally on the screen right now. I as a human cannot read this. My Da is reading it for me and advocating on my behalf. Right?

So you have this giant ecosystem of these things. You have the ah, R interface. Here's another way of viewing a person. This is another way of viewing a person. This one I think it yeah, this is very human. This is somebody going through hard times. So if I look over and I see this on somebody, I'm going to be like, hey, can I buy this person a coffee? Hey, how are you doing? Like you're going through some shit. What's going on? Do you need somebody to talk to? Right.

But this is why I. And to me, and tech is a human thing. I want to be able to connect with this person. And maybe I should read it on their face. Right. But this is a public demon that she's broadcasting, so she's allowing this to go out into the world. That life's messed up right now. So I'm going to go say hi. Right. I'm going to go see if they need a friend. So these are the different demon options. Look there's going to be a

whole ecosystem around this. But anyway, I digress. Okay. Ted's Chris Anderson is looking for somebody to take over the entire Ted organization, and he's running the search like a Willy Wonka contest where anybody can apply. Interesting. Christie's is doing their first AI only art auction, and it's a

lot of traditional artists getting really mad about this. Yeah. Understandably, Google says they are getting rid of their diversity hiring targets for 24, saying it was positive discrimination, which yeah, it might technically be true. That is the purpose of affirmative action is because that particular group needs extra help. So I you got to keep in mind what Dei is for. Like I agree, Dei has caused damage. It's

it's been poorly implemented. The concept is not broken. The concept is great and we should still continue doing it. I think what they are saying, I'm giving you a charitable reading here. What they're saying is that we're still doing Dei the correct way, which is we still want to hire everyone who's capable and who's best qualified for the job, and we are absolutely looking for underrepresented groups

to do that. What they are saying, charitable interpretation, again, is that we are not specifically going to say we must hire this many of this particular group, and we exclude other qualified candidates because they are not those groups. They are saying they are discarding that because they're getting sued over it. And it's not a good idea and it's reverse discrimination and all of that. So the question

is how does this look in a few years? Is it that they're actually getting rid of all Dei, all affirmative action and they're just using this as cover? Yeah. So here's here's my comment on this surprising not surprising that all these programs disappeared overnight on January 21st. What does that tell you? And like I say here, it tells me that they couldn't wait for a reason or opportunity to do this, so they've been wishing they could

do it already. So what I'm hoping is it doesn't just get rid of all affirmative action, which like I said, the core concept is correct and we need to continue doing it until we actually have equal opportunity, which we do not right now. Doctors are now a major client base for weight loss drugs like Ozempic. This link said something like 40% of doctors are on Ozempic. I like that, although few decades ago all doctors were smoking camels, so

doesn't necessarily mean it's perfect advice. New York City is. Subway crime dropped by 36% in January because they added 1200 more police? Yeah, only 147 subway crimes in January 25th, compared to 231 in January. And they got 300 specifically for overnight trains. Love it. Yeah. More cops like it. Measles outbreak is hitting the least vaccinated parts of Texas, with nine cases in an area where only 82% of kids are vaccinated. You actually need 95% for herd immunity.

We're also in the worst flu season the last 15 years. But, uh, but Covid was actually super annoying. So let's not talk about let's not talk about, uh, flu or pandemics or anything like that that could actually benefit humanity because Covid was annoying. I think that's a good policy. One of my favorite thinkers, Robin Hanson, breaks down how different social circles value different status markers. And specifically, he's looking at his own friend group and how people that he hangs

out with pursue and signal value. And he says most intellectuals that he knows are actually chasing fame and prestige. He's not talking about his core friends, his core friends. The highest sort of social status is two polymaths who follow evidence across disciplines. That's who I like to hang out with, too. I think we should all like that. After 12 years of Walmart domination. Amazon just jumped ahead with 187.8 billion in quarterly revenue. Compared to Walmart's expected

180 billion. So that's revenue. I'm curious about profit, but not curious enough to look it up because why do I care? Ideas paralyzed by crisis I'm a bit paralyzed by what's going on right now in politics and specifically with the government. I basically cycle between depressed, apathetic and very angry. Did the government need to be audited and cleaned up? Yes. Is the best way to start from scratch and be aggressive with it? Possibly. Yeah, I'm kind

of excited about that. But you lose me when I don't see you being careful about the programs that matter. Like this whole. What was it? NCIS, NCIS. I didn't look into it. I get depressed about the stuff, so I just like I tune out. But there's no question to me that a bunch of that stuff was bad and needed to be removed. And there's also no question to me or for me that a bunch of stuff in there was actually really good and it wasn't very expensive,

and you should not have turned it off. Right? So you lose me when you just throw everything out. And maybe they didn't do that. They're claiming that they're putting everything on the Doge website and it's all public and it's all visible. I went and looked yesterday for the first time, because I couldn't bring myself to pull up a government website called Doge, having lived through Dogecoin. So I'm just like, I don't want to go to that website.

But anyway, I go there, it's dot gov. I don't know, it looked like there might have been some data published. I'll probably use AI to figure out if it's like actually publish if it's like legitimate transparency. I saw Elon talk from the white House the other day on YouTube in the middle of the night, which I should have been going to sleep instead. But anyway, he looked honest about it. He looked like he was actually trying to uncover things and do the right thing, which is what

they were claiming they were doing. When I read the media about it, it's like, oh, this is the Antichrist. I don't think Elon is good at lying. When I see him saying that he's trying to do the right thing and he's trying to uncover this stuff, and he's making it public. And this is exactly what they were elected to do. I agree with him. However, you add in Nazi salutes, you add in his personality on X and how it's like slam dunk and like mean and rude.

It doesn't rhyme with the authenticity. I just saw him giving about trying to do this doge thing correctly. So I'm very torn on the whole thing. I'm very like, you know, how how much can I actually believe what I'm hearing right now from from him? Um, I do know that the media portrayal of it, I believe it's wrong. I believe he's they and a bunch of them and a bunch of them are pure garbage. It just outright

pure garbage. I actually don't think Trump is nearly as bad as a lot of people around him, and I don't think Elon is nearly as bad as a lot of the people around him. But at the same time, I can't fully trust Elon. And after the the Nazi salute stuff, honestly, I'm looking for a new car because I don't want to go political here. I already did, but I can't dig on Nazi salutes. I don't think he's anti-Semitic, which is why so many Jewish people still

like him. He's very pro-Israel. He's very pro Jewish, very pro Jewish hostages. So I don't think he's anti-Semitic. Why are you doing Nazi salutes if you're not anti-Semitic? The answer is the answer is he's appealing to AfD about a culture war in Europe, and he's signaling to them that he's on their side. Problem is, it's a fucking Nazi salute that has implications that motivates neo-Nazis in the US,

in Europe, all over the world. And it's not nuanced along the lines of like, oh, he's trolling and he's actually not anti-Semitic. neo-Nazis are anti-Semitic. Hate to tell you. So very upset with him looking for a new car because of this. At the same time, I think the narratives around what they're doing is pure evil. They're actually trying to ruin the country. They're going to go off

their authoritarian. I don't think that's actually accurate. I think they're actually trying to do good inside of the government. This it's actually not the title of this little piece I'm doing right now. Um, it's actually one I'm must not have published that one yet. I'm still working on it. This complexity, the ability to hold multiple conflicting things in your mind is a thing that I believe that we actually need my North Star. I guess I'm going here.

I didn't plan on going here. My North Star is Star Trek the Next Generation. I want a multiracial, multicultural future in which everyone has equal opportunity to thrive. I believe in government programs. I believe in taxation. I believe it is society's purpose and responsibility to make sure that everyone growing up and even into adulthood, if they didn't get this, they get the nurturing that they need to be,

even with everyone else. Then they can launch. They can go to their the limits of their discipline, the limits of their talent, the limits of their creativity, whatever. But you can't have certain groups get left behind and then just be like, oh, well, whatever. No, not whatever. If we are successful, it is our job to lift them. That is what a society is. That is what a government is. That's what taxation is for. And if you listen to somebody like Rogan, he was on with someone

who I really disagree with right now about vaccines. Weinstein, one of the one of the Weinstein brothers. The other one, not, uh, not Eric, his brother. Anyway, very much disagree. Very angry with him about vaccines, very much disagree with him about vaccines. And they, him and Joe, who are considered like extremely right at this point by all my very left friends, they are both like, we need government programs. We need those government programs to help people who need them. We

cannot get rid of taxation. Taxation is great because it helps people lift up to the bottom. And I'm like, see these people? Look, these people all used to be liberals, including Elon, including Joe. This is why I disagree with Harris and I might be wrong about this. I also disagree with my friend Marcus. Marcus Hutchins about this. He's very much in the camp of Sam Harris about this. And sorry, I ended up going very, very politics on

this one. Feel free to skip ahead to the discovery section if you don't want to hear me, close this out. But it's top of mind for me and I want to mention it. I want to rescue center people. I consider Elon a center person. I consider Joe a center person. I consider, well, Sam Harris is definitely a center person, but these people who I feel like have strayed and gone crazy with vaccines and like gone crazy with conspiracies.

If they are still core liberal like I am, who believe society's responsibility is to help everyone and lift them up, and they want to build a multiracial, multicultural future which also lifts people up and is humanistic in nature and is based on maximizing benefit for all of humanity. That means there are liberal. That's why I am a liberal. If they believe that, then I will stick with them through the nastiness of all this other crap. The moment I see, the moment I see that they are actually

not going for that. And what they're actually going for is like a white race is better thing where it's like, does it matter where you came from? It doesn't matter what you get. Um, your identity is what matters more. Guess what? Those are the same on the far left and the far right. It's most known on the far right. Right. You must be light skinned. You must be white. You must be whatever. You must be Jewish. You must be whatever it is that they're obsessed with. They think that's

the best one. And they think everything else should fall under that. That is that's a zero for me. That is a do not pass go if that is the world you are trying to build, I do not support you and I will not support you. So the reason I continue to support to some limited degree people like Joe, people like Elon, is because I believe they're going for the other one. They're going for the one that I'm going for, which is this mutual lifting up of everyone

into a multiracial, multicultural future. And the moment they stop supporting that, the more in anything they do that doesn't support that, I fight them on because I'm not confused about what my morals are. I'm not confused about my politics. They have not changed. They will not change. This is why I voted for Kamala, because somebody tried to change the vote on vote verification day, and they're claiming that it's not a crime. I'm not cool with that. I

can't vote for him. End of story. So all of this to say that complexity is required to make sense out of a complex world, right? There is criticism of people like myself who try to manage this complexity of like, looking at all sources and all claims and everything in like multiple levels and multiple layers and trying to find the good in it and trying to find the bad in it. People, there are people who say, and these are like my far left friends and my far right

friends who are like, um, you're both sides. No, no, the world is both sides. Like, if you judged the actual deep moral character of everyone that you hang out with based on the worst thing that they've done, you would not talk to anybody. You understand that? You would not talk to anybody. Like a lot of the people that we hang out with, they would become horrible people if they had the power of the people who have power. Right? And that's just reality. That's just like how the world works.

So I think we should focus on and I talked about this somewhere else. I think we should focus on figuring out this person that you're talking about, this person that you are supporting, this person that you are criticizing, this person that you think is the Antichrist, whatever. Figure out the ideal world that they are trying to build, then think about your world that you are trying to

build and see how similar they are. I would argue if those two worlds are similar, then the work that we need to do is to try to help them and help yourself muddle through the garbage, muddle through the the chaos, muddle through the noise, muddle through the emotion, whatever to get to this mutual place. And this is why I still support people who my friends on the far left have abandoned and completely abandoned a long time ago. I support them because I think, I think, and I

could be wrong about this. And the moment I'm wrong about this, I switch to this fast. Okay. I think that the thing they are trying to build is very similar to the liberal thing that I want to build, and I want to see happen. That's it. It's that simple. If I think the world they are trying to build is this liberal world and that they are wrong about it, they are misguided about it. They don't know something. They're super dumb about a thing. I don't care about any

of that. I care about what's inside of them. I care about their soul. I care about what they're trying to actually build. Right. So that's what I'm trying to figure out. This is why I am less worried about Trump now, because I see much more clear the thing that he's trying to build. It's actually not that bad. I don't like the guy because he's an egomaniac and like, half the things he says like, drive me absolutely crazy.

And I think he's being influenced by Russia. I don't think he's I don't think he's a Russian asset at all. I don't think he's being, uh, directly manipulated by anyone at all. I think he's being side manipulated by narratives that are in his brain that could actually help people, that we don't want to help. But the point is, I think he wants a world, first of all, and this is really a tangent, he actually wants less nuclear weapons.

He wants peace time. The downside for this guy is he wants a statue, and he wants people to stand up and salute when he walks in the room. The guy's he's a narcissist. Okay, but half the world is created by narcissists. If he's a narcissist who wants to build an amazing world where Literally the whole planet loves him. Does not fear him. He doesn't put everyone in jail. He doesn't kill everyone. He's not stalling. He's not Hitler. If that's the world he's trying to build, I'll take

those floors. I will take those floors. He wants to denuclearize. He wants. He wants to, like, have all these countries get along. If that's the world he's actually trying to build. And I'm not sure of that. But if that is, then I put him in a much lower threat level. There are people around him in this administration who are not trying to build that world. They are trying to build something nasty, nasty, and they're using him and his, uh,

naive naivete to try to get what they want. And so when I find those people, I'm like, yeah, that's garbage. Total garbage. Elon, I think he's going for a better version. I think he's going for a good world. I think it rhymes in is very similar to mine. Very angry with what he's currently doing, his actual actions. Right. But if I find out that he's not trying to build that world, he's trying to build this other world, this race centered one, or this inequality built one or whatever,

that's it. I'm done with them. That's it. Right. That is that is how I operate in this world. And I would recommend I would appeal to you, especially if you're one of my friends on the left and also one of my friends on the right. Think about what they're trying to build and let everything else fade away. Let that be the center that you focus on in your political conversations. And don't let media or noise or distraction, you know, pull you away from that central conversation. What

are we trying to build? How can we get there? And again, apologies for going into it is in the ideas section. So it's not in a news section, but uh, hopefully you didn't have to sit through that if you didn't want to hear here politics, but hopefully it's a good message that you got at the end. Moving on to discovery Lmics. This is probably the coolest AI library that you've never heard of. This thing abstracts your LLM calls to a universal config. So basically you have a

little piece of like JavaScript or JSON like config. And you can send this to any back end. It speaks all the different AI back ends. Right. So you use this in like a proxy and like a lambda or like some sort of like AI function. So this is for people like myself who are building AI. But you

don't have to write that code yourself. You have that thing implemented in this LLM X library, and then every single app that you build, every single component that you build, all these different multi-level, uh, agent systems and everything, they all have prompts. They all have models. They all have configs being sent to the models. You do that in this tiny little piece of config. That's what gets sent to Lmax and it handles everything for you. And the

return comes back in a super clean way. It's the coolest thing ever. It's from a friend of mine who put this out, and it's like not getting near the coverage that it should get. You should absolutely check it out. MTR this thing combines traceroute and ping. I put this in here every year or so. It's like a really cool utility. It combines traceroute and ping and shows you connection quality between hops in real time. So it's just

a cool geeky tool. RPG Map Bundle collection of print and play RPG maps for your next role playing game. Especially if you're doing like a one off and you just need maps real quick. A blog and pure text files. I think it's a cool idea. Just write however you do it. Science is a strong link problem. Very cool essay and a frustrated Redditor asks what career options exist for those who consider themselves less intelligent. I thought this

was a really fascinating discussion on Reddit. Recommendation of the week. Remember that there's only so much that one person can do. Good books are always there for you. Go to the classics. If you're wondering what to read because you don't want to like current events or politics or anything to seep in. Go to the classics. Read the classics. Maybe not political ones,

but tons of books. Books that are there to cradle you and save you and enrich you while you get some needed separation from the shit show that is reality. And supplement this with journaling. Um. My friend Clint Gibler really has continually emphasized how important journaling is to him, and it's got me writing more journal entries, so I

highly suggest that as well. Especially combined with separating and possibly reading good books, the good books will give you ideas which you could also combine with your life experience and turn that into journaling. And the combination of the two is really beneficial. And the aphorism of the week. It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them. It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can

afford to be stupid with them. Ralph Waldo Emerson. Unsupervised learning is produced on Hindenburg Pro using an SM seven B microphone. A video version of the podcast is available on the Unsupervised Learning YouTube channel, and the text version with full links and notes is available at Daniel Metzler Comm Slash newsletter. We'll see you next time.