Unsupervised Learning NO. 387

   July 26, 2023  Posted in Mix


Unsupervised Learning is a Security, AI, 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.

Busy is good, right? I’ve been productively scrambling in the last few weeks and now HackerCamp is within striking distance. Lots of podcast appearances, our migration to Beehiiv, customer engagements to keep the skills sharp, a new talk that I’m excited about. It’s all splendid. Wouldn’t want it else-wise!

I’m also trying out a new style of content links this week, with rich HTML embeddings for the stories, but with my own custom summaries like usual! Added benefit: you get to see the link! Let me know how you like it.

I hope you’re busy as well, and that it’s the good kind.

🧠 Is modern parenting creating narcissists?
🔒 Top cybersecurity official warns of Chinese hackers
🇷🇺 New Russian hacking unit identified
🚀 NVIDIA’s AI red team philosophy
📈 McKinsey says AI will massively boost productivity
💊 MDMA helps white supremacist move away from hate
🔎 Google further soils the bed

U.S. spy agencies buy tons of US citizens’ data
This isn’t really surprising, but it’s a bit disturbing to think about. U.S. spy agencies have been purchasing vast quantities of Americans’ personal data, raising privacy concerns as commercially available information (CAI) replicates results of intrusive surveillance techniques. The report commissioned by the Director of National Intelligence highlights the need for better policies, procedures, and safeguards around the acquisition of such data. I’ve been saying for a long time that data brokers are the biggest threat to US citizen privacy, not hackers. MORE

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Meta AI introduces Voicebox, a groundbreaking generative AI model for speech that generalizes across tasks with state-of-the-art performance.

– Voicebox can synthesize speech in six languages, perform noise removal, content editing, style conversion, and diverse sample generation.
– The model is based on Flow Matching, outperforming current state-of-the-art models like VALL-E and YourTTS in terms of intelligibility and audio similarity.
– Potential use cases include in-context text-to-speech synthesis, cross-lingual style transfer, speech denoising and editing, and diverse speech sampling.
– Due to potential risks of misuse, Meta AI is not making the Voicebox model or code publicly available at this time.
– The researchers also developed a highly effective classifier to distinguish between authentic speech and audio generated with Voicebox.

ai.facebook.com/blog/voicebox-generative-ai-model-speech

Google Further Soils the Bed
I’m stunned that Google is getting rid of Google Domains. I seriously cannot understand the strategy with them anymore. I feel like they’ve lost their way and are listening to anyone who claims to have a direction. But even then, I can’t imagine this pitch being compelling. They should have a simple plan for the next couple of years, which is to 1) find everything they’re doing well, that people actually like, and 2) don’t mess those things up! That might not be a strategy, but it’s better than whatever they’re doing now. I’ve never seen Innovator’s Dilemma more live and in color than what Google is currently doing to itself.

I’m going to be reading the new Rick Rubin book on creativity. Could be a recommendation for UL Book Club! MORE

As I’m writing this week’s newsletter, I’m loving the expanded and rich sections, but I’m also missing the simplicity and Spartan nature of the original. We live and we grow. Do let me know where you come down on this. I’m betting we’ll end up with some sort of hybrid.

Thanks to all you members who are in the process of migrating your membership to the new Beehiiv platform. I know it’s annoying but I have a ton of inspiration from the cleanliness of the new platform, and it’s absolutely going to be worth it! See you over on the new Member Portal!

Recurring revenue for engineers MORE

Speed run your favorite podcasts. Quick summaries of the top points. MORE

MVP: Senior Programmers vs. Juniors + GPTs MORE

I don’t trust Signal (I’m not here yet personally, but I like presenting alternative opinions argued decently) MORE

📹I can’t stop thinking like an attacker, and I’m ok with that MORE

In Praise of Blowing Up Your Life MORE

Is everyone becoming a product manager? MORE

The best teams I’ve worked with MORE

RECOMMENDATION OF THE WEEK

Life is So Terrible and Beautiful at the Same Time MORE

❝

You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.

Maya Angelou



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