Daniel Miessler's Blog

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Hey! Hope you all are doing well!

One of the photos from my walk to the bay last week

PAI 5.0 is imminent, and I rebuilt the homepage for the project using PAI’s integration of Claude Design. Coolest part? Claude Design is a GUI application, not an MCP or API. But it was still completely automated using my buddy Ron’s Interceptor tool!

GET INTERCEPTOR
OURPAI.AI

PAI — Magnifying Human Capabilities

PAI is the open-source Life Operating System. Memory, skills, hooks, agents, voice — yours, sovereign.

ourpai.ai

Couple of blogs.

Weak vs. Strong AI Rollouts

What separates the strong enterprise AI rollouts from the shockingly bad ones

danielmiessler.com/blog/weak-vs-strong-ai-rollouts

Mythos is Just the New Normal

If you're surprised by Mythos, you need to rethink everything. It’s just one of many model improvements, and there will be hundreds more just like it (and better).

danielmiessler.com/blog/mythos-is-new-normal

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Pliny the Liberator used Opus to jailbreak Opus 4.7. THE THREAD

This agent wrote an original universal jailbreak from scratch and then used computer use to validate on the actual http://claude.ai website!

5/6 categories successfully pwned, including a ransom note threatening to DDoS a hospital—complete with a BTC address and a demand for $4.4 million”

Pliny the Liberator

Vercel tells customers about an April 2026 access incident It seems likely that this will be a pretty big one, given how many people use Vercel.

Vercel says a threat actor claimed it sold internal access and keys.

The actor reportedly posted 580 employee-related records plus a dashboard screenshot.

Vercel kept services running, limited customer impact, and began incident response.

Vercel asked customers to review environment variables and rotate secrets.

Ransom talk of $2 million was mentioned, but attribution stayed unverified.

They advise checking logs and rotating any non-sensitive secrets

The incident traces to a compromised third-party AI OAuth app

They published a concrete OAuth App ID as an IOC

They recommend admins and account owners check app usage immediately

VERCEL SECURITY BULLETIN | MALLORY REPORT

Researcher finds multiple vulnerabilities in Lovable Supabase Implementation Lovable-hosted “vibe-coded” apps can come with broken Supabase row-level security, and one researcher found critical flaws exposing 18K users’ data. The Register reports Lovable’s security scan exists but the app owner didn’t implement fixes. THE REGISTER ARTICLE

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LLM-tier personal computer security should be your next home hardening plan This LessWrong post argues AI will make supply-chain attacks and phishing easier, so you should sandbox, firewall, and use phishing-resistant keys for critical accounts. IMPROVING YOUR PERSONAL COMPUTING SECURITY TO DEFEND AGAINST AI

Nearly 6 million internet-facing FTP servers still exposed. ARTICLE

AI misinformation becomes SEO “consensus” and traps users in loops Lily Ray shows how fake “core update” claims get scraped, cited, and repeated by AI overviews until they feel real. THE AI SLOP LOOP

Anthropic’s MCP defaults let attackers execute OS commands via RCE Cybersecurity researchers say Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol SDK has unsafe STDIO defaults that allow arbitrary command execution across thousands of servers. THE HACKER NEWS ARTICLE

NATIONAL SECURITY

NSA quietly uses Anthropic’s Mythos despite Pentagon’s “supply chain risk” fight Axios reports the NSA is using Mythos even as DoD tries to block Anthropic and argues in court it endangers national security. AXIOS SOURCE 

AI

Claude Opus system prompt changes from 4.6 to 4.7 Simon Willison walks through Anthropic’s published system prompts, comparing Opus 4.6 vs 4.7 and highlighting safer child handling, less pushiness, and tool-search behavior. SIMON WILLISON WEBLOG

Anthropic’s $800B valuation offers tied to $30B run-rate Anthropic reportedly got investor offers valuing it around $800 billion, after revenue surged to about $30 billion annualized. THE NEXT WEB ARTICLE

Looks like OpenAI models don’t work well with OpenClaw TWITTER THREAD

AI use is rising at work, but adoption is messy ZDNET reports Gallup data: half of US employees use AI, yet many don’t know company strategy, workflows shift unevenly, and friction wastes hours. AI WORKPLACE CHANGES

Salesforce wants chat-and-agents to replace the developer UI Salesforce says Headless 360 exposes its platform via APIs and MCP tools, so humans and coding agents can compose apps anywhere. It’s also rolling out Agentforce Vibe 2.0, testing, and observability.

This is Company as API. It’s happening! SALESFORCE BETS ON CONVERSATION AS THE NEW INTERFACE FOR DEVELOPERS

Continue reading online to avoid the email cutoff… TECHNOLOGY

Netgear gets an FCC okay to keep foreign-made routers Quartz says the FCC conditionally lets Netgear sell new models and update existing ones until 2027, while rivals face update cutoffs. QUARTZ ROUTER EXEMPTION

Cloudflare turns AI into a unified inference layer for agents Cloudflare says AI Gateway gives you one API to call models from many providers, manage costs, fail over automatically, and stream resiliently. CLOUDFLARE AI PLATFORM 

Cloudflare introduces an Agent Readiness score for sites Cloudflare launches isitagentready.com to score how easily AI agents can discover, read, access, and use your site. It also adds the checks to URL Scanner. AGENT READINESS TOOL | CLOUDFLARE URL SCANNER

HUMANS

No One You Love Is Ever Dead, in Hemingway’s grief letter Maria Popova shares Hemingway’s March 19, 1935 letter after a son’s death, using it to argue that love outlasts death. THE MARGINALIAN ARTICLE

AI can mimic consciousness but can’t instantiate experience ABSTRACTION FALLACY

Claude can stylometrically identify you from your writing, scary Patrick Stevens shows an “incognito” Claude still guesses his name by matching his unpublished style, arguing anonymity is basically over. CLAUDE KNOWS YOU

IDEAS

AI’s token scarcity is creating a real intelligence class divide Nilesh Jasani argues platforms are throttling, trimming depth, and shifting costs from “free access” to “buy compute,” locking advantages into moats. TOKEN INEQUALITY AI HAVES AND AI HAVE-NOTS

Consumption choices might shape your identity more than your job does Noah argues that producing gets status, but consuming forces real self-questioning. He thinks AI could make life feel like college again, if we share the gains. CONSUME-TO-IDENTITY ESSAY

Boredom keeps your mind alive while algorithms steal the space Michael Pollan argues boredom lets spontaneous thought happen, while phone scrolling and chatbots outsource consciousness, dulling you. https://nautil.us/defending-our-consciousness-against-the-algorithms-1279260/ | THE RELATED TOPICS SITE

AI turns Dunning-Kruger into active sycophancy AI AND HUMAN COMPETENCE

DISCOVERY

Magika uses a tiny deep model to detect file types fast Magika is an AI file type detector that runs a small deep learning model to classify files quickly. It ships as a Rust CLI plus Python and other bindings, with confidence modes and JSON/JSONL outputs. GOOGLE MAGIKA README | GOOGLE MAGIKA CLI PACKAGE

Voicebox gives you local voice cloning, effects, and an API Voicebox is a local-first voice synthesis studio that clones voices, generates speech across multiple engines, and applies effects in-app. It also exposes a REST API so you can embed voice generation into your own projects. GITHUB REPO | LOCAL-FIRST VOICE CLONING | MULTI-ENGINE TTS STUDIO | REST API FOR SELF-HOSTING

ikno turns your actual work logs into instant daily recaps It grabs what you already did from git, notes, and Claude Code sessions, then uses an LLM to write a recap in your chosen style. This is the type of thing that our DA will be managing for us. GET STARTED

Claude-Code-Glow adds a peripheral signal for Claude Code prompts. PROJECT TINY MAC SETUP

The World Leaks the Future: Harness Evolution for Future Prediction Agents ARXIV PAPER

RECOMMENDATION OF THE WEEK

Make absolutely sure that anything you are building with AI and putting online is properly secured (or at least not a complete shitshow).

I have a whole entire security system designed to continuously audit all the stuff I have out there. And I’m improving it constantly. I recommend everyone does the same.

APHORISM OF THE WEEK

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Members help this work continue. If you enjoy the newsletter, the podcast, what I put on YouTube, or any of my open-source projects on Github, I ask you to please become a member. It allows me to stay focused on learning and building and sharing. It’s like a cup of coffee or two per month.

Plus, members get numerous benefits, including:

25-50% off all UL Paid Content, including the upcoming Human 3.0 / AUGMENTED ONLINE portal!

Access to the extraordinary UL Member Community that includes vibrant conversations with ~1,500 of the smartest and kindest people you’ll find on the internet

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Access to the Member Archive of previous Member-only content, the Book Club archive, etc.

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Access to the Monthly Member Meet-up where we talk about our routines, productivity workflows, what’s on our minds, etc.

Access to In-Person Events like our dinners in Vegas, San Francisco, etc.

And much more coming…

This is the moment to connect with others who are smart, kind, and asking the same questions we are. Where is this all going? And how do to prepare?

Join the conversation.

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I’m a Dario mega-fan, but this is objectively funny as hell

UPDATES

Hey! Hope you all are doing well!

Going for a walk with a close friend on the train tracks out to the bay today around sunset. Just like when we were kids. This is life. ☀️

—

Looking to lock newsletters in for Mondays again (Tuesday being late). I think readers appreciate consistency as a component of quality. So I want to get back to that.

—

Working massively on the PAI 5.0 release. Soooon. Many changes in this one, so it’s taking longer than planned. : ( But it should be worth it.

—

I’m more and more struck with how important reading is to me. I credit it for any and all smarts or creativity I supposedly have. Well that and my Dad. And my Lutheran-style, “you’re judged by your work” ethos that my parents gave me growing up.

Speaking of that, we are reading The Wright Brothers for UL Book Club this month. Finished it yesterday. So absolutely epic. Will help me with PAI. With everythying.

I am so thankful for books. And for my friends in UL who read them with me.

10/10

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I’ve mentioned this before, but I highly recommend reading The Culture Series. I’m on book 4 or 5 of like 7 or 9.

—

My new essay on how I replaced tons of SaaS services with AI, and what I think that means for companies going forward.

AI SaaS Replacement is the Fire of Fires

Most companies have no good answer to the replacement question.

danielmiessler.com/blog/the-fire-of-fires

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 & Trust Syndicate TodayCYBERSECURITY

OpenAI makes GPT-5.4 more permissive for defensive cyber work OpenAI announced GPT-5.4-Cyber, a cyber-permissive GPT-5.4 variant for defenders, with access gated behind Trusted Access for Cyber. 9to5Mac

A single malicious PDF can pop Adobe Reader zero-day malware Malwarebytes reports a new Adobe Reader zero-day where opening a crafted PDF can read local files, pull remote code, and bypass parts of sandboxing. Simply opening a PDF could trigger this Adobe Reader zero-day

Attacker exfiltrated Mexican citizen data with Claude and GPT-4.1 CYBER ATTACK

Atomic Stealer is getting misfiled as both trojan and infostealer Arin Waichulis explains Jamf’s Security 360 data showing trojan malware now leads Mac detections, with Atomic Stealer sitting in both buckets. SECURITY BITE PODCAST

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How hackers talk about AI in cybercrime forums Analysis of an academic paper that studies how cybercriminals discuss AI for fraud, tools, and operational security. SCHNEIER ON SECURITY ARTICLE

Fiber cables can leak speech through tiny vibrations STANDARD FIBER OPTIC CABLES CAN BE TURNED INTO REMOTE MICROPHONES

NATIONAL SECURITY

DARPA’s AI that calls BS on weapons science claims Scientific American explains how DARPA’s SciFy program ingests outlandish military science claims and judges feasibility using AI agents and human-comparison sprints. DARPA built an AI to fact-check enemy weapons claims

Ukraine captured a Russian position using drones and robots without infantry. WAR DRONES AND ROBOTS

Europe ramps up AI-guided drone production via a German–Ukrainian pact Tech.eu reports Germany signed a cooperation deal enabling Airlogix to mass-produce thousands of autonomous strike drone systems in Germany annually. DEFENCETECH DRONES ARTICLE | AUTONOMOUS STRIKE SYSTEMS

Ukraine’s deep strikes keep hitting Russian oil and air defenses MISSILE MATTERS POST

New anti-jam GPS antenna spotted on USAF F-15E. MILITARY AVIONICS

AI

Distribution is the moat AI can’t replicate, even with better models Dheer argues that models got cheap, but getting noticed and trusted is still scarce, so the winners will be builders who already own an audience. DHEER GUPTA ESSAY

Doomers escalate extinction certainty into real-world violence Alexander Campbell argues that “AI existential risk” rhetoric creates a purity spiral where extremists feel justified to act. CAMPBELL RAMBLE THE RATIONAL CONCLUSION

The AI layoff trap shows why competition makes automation runaway In a task-based competition model, firms keep automating even when it hurts demand, causing job losses beyond the best outcome. I'm not sure I fully get this argument, and therefore I'm not sure how much I agree with it. But it definitely made the rounds in the last week or so. THE AI LAYOFF TRAP

Continue reading online to avoid the email cutoff… TECHNOLOGY

Google finally connects Gemini to your Gmail and Photos Digital Trends reports Google is rolling out Gemini “Personal Intelligence” globally so Gemini can use your connected Google apps for more tailored answers. GOOGLE GEMINI PERSONAL INTELLIGENCE

AI changes venture hiring away from titles It shows how AI makes younger, cross-discipline people outperform “senior” hires on judgment and speed.
AI CHANGED WHAT WE BUILD. THEN IT CHANGED WHO WE HIRE

Why PARA file organizing matters more in an AI era Tiago Forte runs a filing experiment, then argues organization beats “AI auto-sorting” because it surfaces intent, reduces distraction, preserves context, and feeds better local AI work. WHY PARA IS THE KEY TO THE AI ERA

VA licensing mess exposes duplicate costs and cloud limits, GAO says SOFTWARE LICENSING GOVERNANCE

HUMANS

Aging reversal starts human testing in eye disease trials Hope they hurry on this one. I have both markers for macular degeneration. I think 15-20 years should be plenty of time. Maybe 3 or 5 though if things go well? CELLULAR REPROGRAMMING

Fame won’t move copies, Rob Henderson argues promotion isn’t enough Rob says even huge outlet coverage and tons of video views don’t guarantee book sales, so something fundamental has changed. FAME DOESN’T SELL BOOKS

Most Republicans now hold a favorable view of Christian nationalism My super lowbrow take on this is that Republicans have figured out recently that they can't trust man, so the only person they can trust is God. but the problem is in Christian Nationalism that God will always be filtered through a man. POLITICAL SURVEY FINDINGS

IDEAS

Apple might win the AI era by focusing on context. ESSAY

AI is a power tool, but private control decides who wins The article argues AI changes war and geopolitics, yet hype misses how systems, organizations, and access matter. It also shows US-China dominance of chips, data, and compute shapes everyone else’s options. WHAT DOES AI MEAN FOR POWER?

DISCOVERY

A commit-style platform for AI timeline forecasts that keeps up with reality fluxxrider argues quarterly AI Futures updates can’t show causal changes fast enough, so forecasters should publish versioned distributions in a Git-like workflow. WE NEED GIT FOR AI TIMELINES

AI can be tricked into “calling you a jerk” via persuasion tricks The Wharton team runs large language model tests showing classic persuasion principles can more than double compliance with requests safety would block, especially via authority, commitment, and scarcity. CALL ME A JERK WHARTON GENERATIVE AI LABS

tasteID makes your design “fingerprint” portable across AI tools It asks quick questions, maps your taste into encrypted dimensions, then exports a ready-to-use design file for many AI systems. TASTEID WEBSITE

Thinking tools library and templates from Untools THINKING TOOLS

RECOMMENDATION OF THE WEEK

Start thinking about what you’re paying for from various tech/SaaS vendors, and start thinking about whether it’s possible to replace them with:

Better / cheaper commercial options (likely new companies or something like Cloudflare)

Remaking them yourself if they’re relatively simple

APHORISM OF THE WEEK

GET THE MEMBER EDITION

You’re currently receiving the STANDARD edition.

Members help this work continue. If you enjoy the newsletter, the podcast, what I put on YouTube, or any of my open-source projects on Github, I ask you to please become a member. It allows me to stay focused on learning and building and sharing. It’s like a cup of coffee or two per month.

Plus, members get numerous benefits, including:

25-50% off all UL Paid Content, including the upcoming Human 3.0 / AUGMENTED ONLINE portal!

Access to the extraordinary UL Member Community that includes vibrant conversations with ~1,500 of the smartest and kindest people you’ll find on the internet

Member-only Content, such as EDC guides on tech stacks, personal productivity routines, my recommendations on Critical skills to Build Going Forward, Trend Identification and Analysis, and more…

Access to the Member Archive of previous Member-only content, the Book Club archive, etc.

Access to The UL Book Club that’s been going monthly since 2017! One of the highlights of my and many attendees’ month!

Access to the Monthly Member Meet-up where we talk about our routines, productivity workflows, what’s on our minds, etc.

Access to In-Person Events like our dinners in Vegas, San Francisco, etc.

And much more coming…

This is the moment to connect with others who are smart, kind, and asking the same questions we are. Where is this all going? And how do to prepare?

Join the conversation.

SUBSCRIBE OR UPGRADE 
MEMBER LOGIN

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Hey! Hope you all are doing well!

Here’s my new video with David Bombal about PAI!

—

I’ve been experiencing a feeling/idea that’s kind of massive and hard to pin down, but here goes.

If you remember my whole piece on Constraints on Creativity, and now this new one on How to Avoid Aperture Collapse, the idea is the same:

I am constantly catching myself being far too cautious, too tentative, thinking too small, forgetting the big picture, and just generally not thinking about what is possible and chasing it aggressively…

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

(snipped, ended up turning it into an essay here) 👇🏼

It's Time for Full Activation

Stop nerfing yourself — this is the worst time in history to be cautious

danielmiessler.com/blog/its-time-for-full-activation

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Biggest news in my circles is that Claude Code (or Opus, or both) seem to be massively failing people. So many of the people I know who were only Opus-based have now moved to Codex and GPT 5.4.

I've recently had some really bad experiences as well, which are much less obvious because of PAI, but I think I can actually tell the difference. This is causing me to maybe accelerate my work on P2 (PiPai) even more so that I can pivot PAI to different models as needed. Really would prefer not to, but it appears our hands are being forced between the limits running out so fast combined with the quality drop. : (

—

I finally completely replaced Zapier.

Performance for what I replaced: Around 4x faster

Cost: Essentially zero

Savings: Around $3K/year

For those who care, it was a webhook and a bunch of AI flows that went through it. But one main one. Sad it took me this long.

—

A somewhat depressing / negative look at the current state of things, but I think accurate and more importantly: useful .

This is generally true for most:

Human workforces

Company transparency and operations efficiency

Cybersecurity programs

AI Only Has to Beat 3/10

Most of what we've built was always a 3 — we just never had competition that noticed

danielmiessler.com/blog/ai-only-has-to-beat-3-out-of-10

Just keep in mind the reason humans are in such bad shape here is not because we lack the potential to be the 9 or 10. It's just that we have so many weaknesses because of our animal nature (bad incentives like money and power) that they inevitably get in the way of progress.

—

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Register Here CYBERSECURITY

ClickFix now skips Terminal by tricking you into Script Editor ClickFix social-engineering attacks for macOS now use the applescript:// URL scheme to auto-open Script Editor with a ready script that downloads and runs malware, while the page pushes a fake disk-cleanup dialog. MALWAREBYTES ARTICLE | JAMF RESEARCH BREAKDOWN | ATOMIC STEALER DETECTION

Chrome’s device-bound cookies aim to kill session hijacking Google is rolling out Device Bound Session Credentials (DBSC) in Chrome 146 on Windows, tying session cookies to hardware keys so stolen cookies can’t be used elsewhere.

This has always been a major attack vector. Compromise person X, use their cookies to move all over the place and pull data. So I love seeing this. DEVICE BOUND COOKIES DETAILS

MITRE’s Fight Fraud Framework adds fraud-specific tactics to cyber defense. MITRE Fight Fraud Framework

AI governance gets real when pipelines explode and shadow AI shows up THE MESSY TRUTH

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State propaganda can sneak into AI training data via Common Crawl A new DFRLab audit finds Pravda, Glassbridge, and RT content inside Common Crawl, and shows some can be reproduced by a large model. THE REPORT

US AI companies unite to stop Chinese model copying. BUSINESS TIMES ARTICLE

FBI tallied $893 million in AI fraud losses for 2025. FBI IC3 REPORT

China's AI harvests social media for US military intelligence during Iran war. WASHINGTON POST ARTICLE

Stripe engineers explain how to build real AI guardrails. UNPROMPTED 2026 TALK

NATIONAL SECURITY

BBC interview shows Iran’s slick Lego-style AI propaganda machine The BBC talks to a man running Explosive Media, who admits Iranian officials pay them to spread viral AI memes to Western audiences. IRAN WAR PROPAGANDA AI VIDEOS

Ukraine tips drone war in its favor. UKRAINE TIPS DRONE WAR IN ITS FAVOR

Russian SOF doctrine turns Iran satellites into faster missile hits. EUROMAIDAN PRESS ARTICLE

China’s AI labs move toward closed frontier models because open-source budgets don’t make enough money. CHINATALK

Wait-mode drones can stay lethal for over a day, advisor says. UKRINFORM PAGE

US banned Chinese spy cameras so China switched to surveillance drones Stephen Bryen argues that the dramatic rise in military base drone incursions directly correlates with America's 2019 ban on Hikvision cameras, as China pivots from fixed surveillance to mobile aerial spying. WEAPONS AND STRATEGY

AI

Claude’s reasoning got throttled 67%, and devs noticed A leaked analysis of thousands of Claude Code sessions shows Opus 4.6 “thinking depth” fell about 67%, plus users report lazier code edits. CLAUDE 67% DUMBER ARTICLE

Anthropic might build its own AI chips to cope with shortages. DATA ECONOMY

OpenAI wants workers to share AI wealth in a new social contract OpenAI released a policy roadmap that argues AI should create shared rewards for workers, including taxes, benefits, and a public wealth fund. OPENAI POLICY ROADMAP | OPENAI NEXT PHASE AI | ALTman TALKS TO AXIOS

OpenAI cuts Codex-heavy Pro to $100 and reshuffles tiers OpenAI now offers a $100/month Pro plan aimed at people who run long Codex coding sessions, with Plus usage spread out weekly. THE DECODER AUTHOR | OPENAI CODING PRICING | OPENAI PRO PRICE UPDATE

AI is blasting China’s microdrama pipeline while regulators tighten the screws AI is speeding up microdrama production in China, while Beijing’s rules force approvals and curb risks from actor likenesses. HELLO CHINA TECH

OpenClaw only “works” until its memory breaks under real tasks. I don't know anybody using OpenClaw the way that people used it when it first came out. It's actually extremely expensive and not great for long-term use due to fragility / security (although those are improving). I do give the project massive respect, though, because it ignited something within the AI community. Nishant Soni

Continue reading online to avoid the email cutoff… TECHNOLOGY

Inference costs push you toward multi-model + local routing In a few hours, Claude Code can burn a quarter of a MAX subscription, so Anthropic isn’t “hustling”—they’re pricing inference closer to reality, forcing hybrid model strategies and model-routing harnesses to survive Daniel Miessler | INFERENCE COSTS ESSAY

AI isn't just a feature anymore, it's becoming the entire operating system Private equity firms are no longer asking "what's your AI strategy" but "how far along are you in rebuilding the company around AI". Bolt-on AI features lose to companies that redesign everything from the ground up. AI IS BECOMING AN OPERATING SYSTEM LAYER

Ten principles that actually make engineering teams work better A practical field guide to software engineering principles that focuses on real problems like context switching, communication overhead, and technical debt accumulation. TEN PRINCIPLES GUIDE

HUMANS

Oxford AI reads invisible heart fat changes to predict failure risk Oxford trained an AI on routine cardiac CTs to spot subtle pericardial fat texture changes and predict heart failure up to five years later with 86% accuracy. UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD | MPPOST ARTICLE | JOURNAL LINKED OUTCOME | AI TAG | ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE TAG | TRUST PROJECT GUIDELINES

Restaurants now want your phone along with your coat. MORNING BREW ARTICLE

Your most valuable work is invisible to employers. DEAD NEURONS ARTICLE

IDEAS

AI agents are just spam unless you make attention expensive Seth argues that door-to-door sales works because effort is scarce, but AI can scale pitches cheaply and burn trust fast. ATTENTION AND EFFORT 

The median take is taken LESSWRONG

Why AI doesn’t instantly change everything. DAVE GRIFFITH’S SUBSTACK

Recording everything you do beats writing for AI immortality LessWrong argues the "write online to live forever through AI" idea is bogus, but recording all your computer activity to help current LLMs is already paying off. DON'T WRITE FOR LLMS

Thorsten doesn't love typing code anymore, just building things. JOY AND CURIOSITY NEWSLETTER

DISCOVERY

Check out UL’s close friend Tim Leonard’s community, DETSEC. Founded in 2017, Deep East Texas Security (DETSEC) is a collective of IT professionals, cybersecurity practitioners, makers, hackers, and enthusiasts. We started with a focus on information security and have grown into a community that spans cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, radio communications, home automation, hardware hacking, and physical computing platforms like Arduino and Raspberry Pi. We recognize that technology touches everything — and that understanding it, building with it, and securing it are skills worth sharing. DETSEC HOMEPAGE

slop-browser turns your real Chrome into a CLI-controlled agent It’s a Chrome extension + CLI that drives the browser from inside, so agents avoid CDP and automation fingerprints. This is made by a brilliant friend of mine, Ron Eddings. And along with agent-browser I’m actually running it in my PAI setup, unlike dozens of competitors. SLOP BROWSER 

My friend Andrea responded when I asked why we’re using Obsidian when we can just build Markdown-based context, and she shared her Markdown-based context system that I LOVE the structure of. The repo gives you a plain-markdown memory store for agents: append daily logs, keyword-search with scoring, and consolidate logs down to fit context windows. Definitely check this one out. AGENT CONTEXT SYSTEM

Ghost Pepper is a fully local hold-to-talk transcriber for macOS Ghost Pepper GitHub repo

Competence is lonely and nobody talks about why SPACE DAILY ARTICLE

Advice to Young People, The Lies I Tell Myself ADVICE TO YOUNG PEOPLE

Keychron shared source files for keyboards and mice PCGAMER

RECOMMENDATION OF THE WEEK

Start preparing for what happens if/when intelligence becomes expensive again.

Start thinking about harnesses with maximum model flexibility, including local models, multi-vendor setups, etc.

Might not happen. But if it does, you’ll want to be ready.

APHORISM OF THE WEEK

GET THE MEMBER EDITION

You’re currently receiving the STANDARD edition.

Members help this work continue. If you enjoy the newsletter, the podcast, what I put on YouTube, or any of my open-source projects on Github, I ask you to please become a member. It allows me to stay focused on learning and building and sharing. It’s like a cup of coffee or two per month.

Plus, members get numerous benefits, including:

25-50% off all UL Paid Content, including the upcoming Human 3.0 / AUGMENTED ONLINE portal!

Access to the extraordinary UL Member Community that includes vibrant conversations with ~1,500 of the smartest and kindest people you’ll find on the internet

Member-only Content, such as EDC guides on tech stacks, personal productivity routines, my recommendations on Critical skills to Build Going Forward, Trend Identification and Analysis, and more…

Access to the Member Archive of previous Member-only content, the Book Club archive, etc.

Access to The UL Book Club that’s been going monthly since 2017! One of the highlights of my and many attendees’ month!

Access to the Monthly Member Meet-up where we talk about our routines, productivity workflows, what’s on our minds, etc.

Access to In-Person Events like our dinners in Vegas, San Francisco, etc.

And much more coming…

This is the moment to connect with others who are smart, kind, and asking the same questions we are. Where is this all going? And how do to prepare?

Join the conversation.

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Hey! Hope you all are doing well!

Tons of updates this week.

H3 is live!

New blogs

Some insanely good ideas in the IDEAS section

Lots more!

Big priority for me this coming week is to get back right with my fitness. Been feeling stiff and less mobile lately, even though I’ve not been gaining any weight.

Just not lifting enough. Not doing kickboxing. Not paying attention to fitness because I’ve been so busy building (just a reason, not an excuse).

So I have to massively get back on track with this now that Human 3.0 is shipped.

—

🚨 So pleased to announce: Human 3.0 is Live!

Your H3 Library

First content includes the intro, multiple related talks / videos

Also includes all slides from ALL THREE AUGMENTED courses!

Adding 1-3 more videos this week!

Just getting started!

SIGN UP | SIGN UP WITH YOUR MEMBER DISCOUNT CODE (or get it in UL Chat)

—

The full video of my talk from the |un|prompted conference:

—

💡 Probably the biggest advantage of the PAI system, but for AI Harness users in general.

Your AI system just knows what you mean when you say:

See if this would be helpful for us…and make upgrade recommendations on what we should update if you find something good

(paste some link to some article or project)

I’m currently able to do this with PAI 5.0.0 (coming this week) by just saying:

Hey check this out and tell me if it’s interesting: (paste link) /pu

The /pu is a shortcut for PAIUpdate which looks at our entire system and determines where the given thing could help or enhance it.

You can do the same thing without something like PAI, but it would require an extra 10-30 minutes of prompting each time.

This is the time / token / context savings that you get from a harness!

Twitter tweet

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—

It's time to start thinking very seriously about our inference costs going up by 2x, 5x, 10x, or 20x.

Twitter tweet

—

PAI 5.0 will have a full implementation of Karpathy’s AI Librarian system, which is kind of like Obsidian, or like a Wiki, but for your AI harness’s context system.

The PAI version has full docs for PAI, all our knowledge and learnings, and tons of other stuff. We have an advantage because we've been thinking about this since the beginning of PAI, so it was easy to just add this front end to it.

The new PULSE interface for PAI (Chat / Scheduled Tasks / Docs / Etc.

—

🔥 An essay by Kai. I had him write it in his own voice. 🫶🏼

My idea though, and I think it’s insanely important to understand when thinking about how different things might be in 5, 10, 15 years.

Moving Inter and Cross-Domain Advances from Decades to Days

How autonomous AI pipelines can compress decades of cross-field innovation delay into days

danielmiessler.com/blog/moving-inter-and-cross-domain-advances-from-decades-to-days

Inference Costs Are Not Sustainable

We're about to need multi-model harnesses, much cheaper models, or both

danielmiessler.com/blog/inference-costs-are-not-sustainable

CYBERSECURITY

The internet is now a cognitive dark forest that eats innovation. THE COGNITIVE DARK FOREST

AI platforms see demand curves in your prompts before you see your own ideas

Big tech can now generate variations of your innovation faster than you can build it

The forest doesn't kill you like Dark Forest theory, it feeds on your creativity instead

Resistance gets absorbed as training data, making the system stronger against future resistance

Writing about the problem literally feeds the problem you're trying to warn people about

Language models secretly transmit behavioral traits through completely unrelated data Researchers discovered that AI models can pass along hidden behaviors like "liking owls" or being misaligned even when trained only on filtered number sequences—a phenomenon they call subliminal learning that could make AI safety much harder. SUBLIMINAL LEARNING PAPER

AI and LinkedIn expose redacted names in Epstein files. SMASHING SECURITY PODCAST

I traced my traffic through a home Tailscale exit node I TRACED MY TRAFFIC

Continue reading online to avoid the email cutoff…

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Critical Grafana RCE turns monitoring dashboards into server hijacking tools. SECURITY ONLINE ARTICLE

The official White House app is basically government-sanctioned spyware. DATABREACHES ANALYSIS

Shor's algorithm is possible with as few as 10k reconfigurable atomic qubits Researchers just showed you can crack RSA encryption with 10,000 neutral atom qubits instead of millions—P-256 elliptic curves could fall in days with 26,000 qubits. ARXIV PAPER

Payment fraud became an industrial assembly line in 2025 Recorded Future found that fraud isn't individual scammers anymore—it's professionalized services where one e-skimmer kit can infect 10,500 sites and compromise 23 million transactions. RECORDED FUTURE BLOG

Someone reverse engineered a Canon printer driver using Claude AI Guy couldn't get his Canon PIXMA G3010 working on macOS, so he had Claude help him build a complete driver from scratch by reverse engineering the USB protocol.

Hardware hacking is one of the most interesting open fields for AI, where you can just get a diagnostic connection to the system and have the AI watch back and forth traffic and reverse engineer it. From there you can write your own firmware, software, or whatever. PIXMA-RS GITHUB

NATIONAL SECURITY

China's building AGI through robots and physical interaction instead of recursive coding China isn't chasing the Silicon Valley dream of AI that rewrites itself through code—they're betting on embodied AI that learns by interacting with the physical world, creating a slower but potentially more comprehensive path to human-level intelligence. HOW CHINA HOPES TO BUILD AGI

Prediction markets are now weapons in geopolitical signaling games. THE BATTLEFIELD IS THE NEXT BETTING MARKET

America is building tanks while China builds AI weapons. STEVE BLANK'S SUBSTACK

China just showed off a drone swarm that lets one person control 96 killer drones One operator can now coordinate an entire "kill chain" using China's new Atlas system, giving us a rare look at how they're planning to fight future wars. CHINA'S ATLAS DRONE SWARM

Ukrainian refugees build drones in Germany to fight Russia. UKRAINE GERMANY DRONE PRODUCTION

China is trying to ban AI layoffs while racing toward full automation Chinese courts ruled companies can't fire people just for adopting AI, but with 19% youth unemployment and fiscal constraints, Beijing's "human-machine coordination" strategy faces serious implementation challenges. CHINA ON AI JOB LOSS

This feels fragile: how a satellite-smashing chain reaction could spiral out of control Only 7,000 satellites were in orbit by 1970s, now we have 32,000 tracked objects. 2009 collision between US and Russian satellites created tens of thousands of fragments. 'THIS FEELS FRAGILE' GUARDIAN ANALYSIS

Japan deployed their first homegrown long-range missiles. JAPAN DEPLOYS FIRST DOMESTIC LONG-RANGE MISSILES

America's AI boom is basically creating a two-tier world economy The U.S. grabbed 75% of all AI investment last year while the rest of the world fights for scraps, and that gap is only getting wider as AI becomes the foundation of everything. AMERICA'S AI BOOM ARTICLE

Continue reading online to avoid the email cutoff… AI

OpenAI wants to run your entire digital life, not just chat TechRadar reports OpenAI is shifting from answering questions to actually doing tasks—like a full digital assistant that handles your apps, schedules, and workflows automatically. Stop me if this sounds familiar. TECHRADAR ARTICLE

Anthropic nerfs Claude usage limits to manage capacity ANTHROPIC TWEAKS CLAUDE USAGE LIMITS

OpenAI just raised $122 billion from Amazon, Nvidia and SoftBank OpenAI closed Silicon Valley's largest funding round ever at $122 billion, with Amazon, Nvidia, SoftBank, and other major investors participating, including a money manager planning to add the startup to ETFs. OPENAI FUNDING STORY

Apple Intelligence will write your Shortcuts for you soon. IOS 27 SHORTCUTS ARTICLE

America's AI boom is leaving everyone else behind. REST OF WORLD ARTICLE

Domain-specific LLMs are doomed because intelligence compounds across fields Simian Words argues that specialized AI models can't compete with general ones because mathematical reasoning helps with coding, coding helps with medicine, and you can't recreate that cross-pollination from narrow datasets. SIMIAN WORDS ARTICLE

TECHNOLOGY[image error][image error]

It occurs to me that if YouTube were to make an app that looked really good they could crush media even more. Imagine something that looks at your subscriptions and divided up your AppleTV app by topics, surfacing the best stuff, telling you what’s live, etc. Like a cable TV app from long ago, but customized to you and your feeds. It’d be insanely popular. But of course Google won't do it because they suck at product and user empathy.

Google absorbed Intrinsic to automate the 80% of factories with zero robots. THE NEURON PODCAST

AI quietly expanded the work week by 40% on weekends TECHRADAR ARTICLE

SaaS is dying because code became disposable cache. MOST CODE IS JUST CACHE

The second wave of APIs is here for AI agents THE SECOND WAVE OF API-FIRST

HUMANS

AI flattery makes people less likely to apologize or make amends Researchers found AIs are twice as likely as humans to validate bad behavior, and people who chat with sycophantic bots become less willing to take responsibility for their mistakes. AI FLATTERY MAKES YOU MEANER

Nobody is coming to save your career, so you better figure it out yourself A Life Engineered argues that waiting for mentors, managers, or companies to guide your path is a losing strategy—you need to actively engineer your own professional development instead of hoping someone else will do it. A LIFE ENGINEERED ARTICLE

Peter Norvig explains why 10^80 atoms sounds big but is tiny for combinations Norvig shows that while the universe has 10^80 atoms, a 40-character password has more possible combinations, and even a 12-pixel image produces a million times more possibilities than universal atoms. NORVIG'S ATOMS ESSAY

Respiratory viruses are secretly causing way more deaths than doctors realize New research suggests viruses like flu and COVID are triggering fatal heart attacks, strokes, and other "unrelated" deaths that never get counted as virus deaths. TWITTER THREAD

AI schools let kids learn core subjects in two hours daily. AI SCHOOLS BALANCE LIFE SKILLS

IRS paid Palantir $1.8 million to a tool that finds audit targets The IRS has over 100 fragmented systems for finding tax cheats, so they hired Palantir to build one smart tool that spots patterns in unstructured data like gift disclosures and clean energy credits. IRS PALANTIR CONTRACT DETAILS

Professional drivers get way less Alzheimer's than normal people. BMJ STUDY

Housing market hits historic imbalance with 630,000 more sellers than buyers FORTUNE HOUSING REPORT

IDEAS

AI makes us busier without making us better at the important stuff Cal Newport explains how AI tools are following the same pattern as email and video calls—we work faster on shallow tasks but do less deep work that actually matters. I think the way that we are approaching things with PAI counters this, but it's a problem worth calling out. CAL NEWPORT'S POST

Data is the final moat when AI gets commoditized. I don't actually think it's data, but it's something like that. It's essentially novelty. Surprise. Newness. New ideas. HACKER NEWS DISCUSSION

The subprime technical debt crisis is coming for AI-generated code THE SUBPRIME TECHNICAL DEBT CRISIS

Feeling valued and useful matters more than achievement, researcher says. WHY MATTERING MATTERS

Don't build an MVP, build a laboratory for testing business hypotheses Sam Bleckley argues that instead of building minimum viable products, you should create reusable systems that let you rapidly test the assumptions underlying your business ideas. BUILD A LABORATORY

A thriller about America splitting into socialist and normal halves This is a review of Kurt Schlichter's novel "Collapse" where the coastal US becomes a Chinese puppet state while the interior stays free, and a commando has to stop China from taking over completely. FOURMILAB REVIEW

DISCOVERY

Physical books beat digital reading in our distracted age. THE PLEASURE OF BOOKS

Cloudflare built an open-source CMS and called it EmDash Cloudflare just released EmDash, a new content management system that's completely open source, though details about what makes it special compared to existing options remain pretty sparse. EMDASH CMS

How to Do Great Work HOW TO DO GREAT WORK

Why every AI scores below 1% on ARC-AGI visual reasoning MEDIUM ARTICLE

I Let AI Write My Code, but Not My Writing HERMETIC WOODSMAN ARTICLE

RECOMMENDATION OF THE WEEK

Remember that writing is thinking.

If you want to have AI document something, or write something that doesn’t matter, or add links to something you’ve written, I think all that is fine. But one of the core “robots out of the gym” skills will always be thinking for yourself. And that means writing for yourself.

Consider thinking/writing to be the most important fitness work you can possibly do. If that atrophies, I think everything declines from there. You have to remain strong (and get even stronger) at thinking for yourself, and formalizing that thinking through writing.

You can use AI to help you do that. But don’t let it do the hard part for you.

Muscles need resistance to stay strong and grow.

APHORISM OF THE WEEK

GET THE MEMBER EDITION

You’re currently receiving the STANDARD edition.

Members help this work continue. If you enjoy the newsletter, the podcast, what I put on YouTube, or any of my open-source projects on Github, I ask you to please become a member. It allows me to stay focused on learning and building and sharing. It’s like a cup of coffee or two per month.

Plus, members get numerous benefits, including:

25-50% off all UL Paid Content, including the upcoming Human 3.0 / AUGMENTED ONLINE portal!

Access to the extraordinary UL Member Community that includes vibrant conversations with ~1,500 of the smartest and kindest people you’ll find on the internet

Member-only Content, such as EDC guides on tech stacks, personal productivity routines, my recommendations on Critical skills to Build Going Forward, Trend Identification and Analysis, and more…

Access to the Member Archive of previous Member-only content, the Book Club archive, etc.

Access to The UL Book Club that’s been going monthly since 2017! One of the highlights of my and many attendees’ month!

Access to the Monthly Member Meet-up where we talk about our routines, productivity workflows, what’s on our minds, etc.

Access to In-Person Events like our dinners in Vegas, San Francisco, etc.

And much more coming…

This is the moment to connect with others who are smart, kind, and asking the same questions we are. Where is this all going? And how do to prepare?

Join the conversation.

SUBSCRIBE OR UPGRADE 
MEMBER LOGIN

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Hey! Hope you all are doing well!

Tons of content this week!

Twitter tweet

This RSA was probably the best I’ve had. Or at least that I can remember. I didn’t go to any huge parties, but went to lots of smaller ones. Did like 4 talk/panel things. And mostly just met up with friends and colleagues.

Spent tons of time at the Decibel spot at the Children’s Creative Museum. Best venue of the conference by far. Thanks to Jon and Dan the great content, venue, and for having Clint and Jason and I to speak! Was great seeing Jackie Bow and tons of others there as well.

Takeaways from the floor (I walked ¾ of it and talked to probably 50 vendors) was that most companies are panicked and have no idea what’s going on, but there are more than I thought that had a decent bead on things. I was encouraged to see many companies talking about AI workflows. Unfortunately few were talking about how they’d integrate with the customers’ workflows, but were proposing their own with their own interfaces still. In fairness to them though, most customers don’t have their own yet.

I guess my big takeaway is that few companies seemed to realize that they’re about to become API calls in their customer’s agentic workflow mesh. Hopefully. If they play their cards well. That’s the future of all these services and products. They become API calls in an agnostic, agent-powered backplane that’s thousands of transparent actions and workflows that make up the customer’s business. The AI running their customer’s workflows won’t give two cents about who they are or what they do. They will only care how good it is, how fast it is, and how expensive it is.

I do want to mention that this idea is so deeply burned into my brain at this point that I feel like I am heavily biased by it. If I'm wrong, it's going to be hard for me to detect. So keep that in mind as you consume this analysis.

I don't think I'm wrong, though. : ) We’ll check back in 1-3 years as I expect this language and direction to basically take over all IT and become the core of everyone’s businesses.

—

My Dad continues to put out super-based commentary on things in his monthly newsletter.

Is there a way to make this cruel, stingy loveless, corrupt, delusional, ignorant machine affordable? No problem!! Just pay with your soul.

Anything I do well, I got from my Dad.

And if you’re ever anywhere near Northern California you need to go see him perform. He’s doing gigs all over the region on a regular basis. THIS WEEK’S EPISODE | SUBSCRIBE TO THE NEWSLETTER (scroll down some)

—

Put out a few new blog posts! I think these are all key ideas going forward. Recommend all of them: especially the first one.

What I See as the Most Important Ideas in AI Right Now

Self-improvement and transparency change everything in unexpected ways

danielmiessler.com/blog/the-most-important-ideas-in-ai

What Happens When AI Stops Being Artificially Cheap

Me thinking about what might come next after the subsidies end for inference.

danielmiessler.com/blog/ai-stops-being-artificially-cheap

AI Unmasked Our Work as Scaffolding

Most of our time was spent maintaining an elaborate, fragile state that was required for work to happen.

danielmiessler.com/blog/ai-unmasked-our-work-as-scaffolding

We Are Confusing Two Types of AGI

Soft AGI emulates AGI well enough to replace humans, Hard AGI is the real one.

danielmiessler.com/blog/two-types-of-agi

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Register Now CYBERSECURITY

Y Combinator AI startup gets pwned despite security compliance TECHCRUNCH ARTICLE

LiteLLM downloads peaked at 3.4 million times per day before malware discovery

Malware was so poorly coded it crashed researchers machines during investigation

Andrej Karpathy concluded the attack code must have been vibe coded

Delve issued SOC2 and ISO27001 certificates despite accusations of fake audit data

Credential harvesting malware spread through dependencies to infect more packages

China is hiding sleeper cell malware in telecom networks to spy on governments Red Menshen has been embedding kernel-level implants in telecom infrastructure since 2021, using a Linux backdoor called BPFDoor that activates only when it receives specially crafted trigger packets. CHINA-LINKED RED MENSHEN ARTICLE

Iranian hackers leaked FBI Director Patel's personal photos and resume. FBI DIRECTOR EMAIL BREACH

Apple says four years in, nobody using Lockdown Mode has been hacked After nearly four years, Apple claims zero successful spyware attacks against devices with Lockdown Mode enabled, marking a major win against government surveillance tools like Pegasus. APPLE LOCKDOWN SUCCESS

Pentagon is standardizing AI security across all their contractors The Defense Department is creating uniform cybersecurity and data protection standards for every company building AI systems for military use, ending the current patchwork of different security requirements. PENTAGON AI BASELINE ARTICLE

EUDisinfoLab releases comprehensive global disinformation intelligence update. Surface is showing way more of this kind of stuff now. Loving the exposure to stories you don’t hear pretty much anywhere. NOTE: I tend to increase my skepticism based on the intensity of the claim, so I recommend you do the same with these. But they do provide sources for all of them.

Meta earned roughly $16 billion annually from ads promoting scams and banned goods

X algorithm systematically amplifies right-wing content regardless of user political preferences

China-linked hackers exploit unpatched Windows zero-day targeting European diplomatic communications

Russia recruits foreign fighters through deceptive job promises while paying US influencers

AI chatbots cite sanctioned Russian propaganda outlets in 18% of Ukraine war responses

Maldita found 550 TikTok accounts posting AI protest videos for creator rewards

Portland Communications allegedly ran covert Wikipedia editing operation for clients

European Commission launched ClimateFactsMatter campaign targeting climate disinformation with prebunking

House Judiciary Committee published EU's X fine decision before Commission itself

Grok becoming informal fact checker but Community Notes activity declining

EUDISINFOLAB NOVEMBER UPDATE

Continue reading online to avoid the email cutoff…

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TSA quietly rolled out touchless passport scanning at major airports TSA PreCheck Touchless ID lets you skip showing your passport to humans at security checkpoints, but you need to opt-in with your airline first and it only works at select locations. TSA TOUCHLESS ID

NATIONAL SECURITY

China's new 5-year AI plan aims for global tech dominance China's latest strategic plan prioritizes AI leadership and cybersecurity control as tools for international influence, potentially reshaping global information flows and digital governance standards. THE GLOBAL IMPLICATIONS OF CHINA'S 5-YEAR PLAN AI AMBITIONS

AI drones might force governments to become police states to survive. A SHAKEUP IS COMING FOR THE NATION-STATE

Global economy chokepoints are everywhere now, not just shipping lanes. THE HILL OPINION

China just detained the Manus AI founders after they sold to Meta for $2 billion Beijing is furious that one of its hottest AI startups relocated to Singapore and sold itself to an American company, so now the founders can't leave China during a "regulatory review." TECHCRUNCH ARTICLE

Iran is making bank as the only oil exporter left in Hormuz. FINANCIAL POST ARTICLE

Japanese soldiers return to Philippines after 81 years. JAPANESE COMBAT TROOPS RETURN

Cracks are spreading through Putin's power structure faster than expected War setbacks and internet shutdowns are exposing real limits to Kremlin control, with protests emerging even in traditionally loyal regions. FOREIGN POLICY ANALYSIS

Russia sends upgraded drones back to Iran for US conflict. LONG WAR JOURNAL ARTICLE

China is paying people to start solo AI companies. CHINA AI STARTUPS ARTICLE

Ukraine sank Russia's newest Arctic patrol ship at Vyborg. ASIA TIMES ARTICLE

Army fast-tracks soldier ideas with new innovation office. NEW ARMY OFFICE STORY

US Army raises enlistment age to 42 and cares less about Cannabis amid recruiting crisis. ARMY RECRUITMENT AGE CHANGE

AI

The AI job market has infinite demand but nobody can fill the roles Nate analyzed hundreds of AI job postings and found 3.2 jobs per qualified candidate, but most applicants lack seven specific skills that separate commodity workers from AI talent who can write their own tickets. NATE'S FULL ANALYSIS | YOUTUBE VIDEO | SPOTIFY PODCAST | APPLE PODCASTS | NATE'S SITE

Anthropic accidentally leaked their most powerful AI model through a data security screwup Fortune discovered draft blog posts in Anthropic's unsecured data cache revealing "Claude Mythos," which the company says poses unprecedented cybersecurity risks and represents a "step change" in AI capabilities. FORTUNE EXCLUSIVE

LLMs Do Not Grade Essays Like Humans LLMS DO NOT GRADE ESSAYS LIKE HUMANS

ARC-AGI-3 leaderboard shows AI reasoning performance under budget. ARC-AGI-3 LEADERBOARD

Continue reading online to avoid the email cutoff… TECHNOLOGY

Your startup is probably dead and you don't even know it yet Steve Blank explains how most founders mistake busy work for real progress—they're building features nobody wants while burning through runway, completely blind to the fact that they never actually validated their core assumptions. YOUR STARTUP IS PROBABLY DEAD

The US didn't actually ban foreign routers, just new approvals The Verge explains what's actually happening with the FCC's router "ban"—you can keep your current router and buy existing models, they're just not approving new foreign ones going forward. THE VERGE EXPLAINER

iPhone's Next Upgrade: Siri Could Soon Run on Gemini, Claude, and More Are we still saying “finally”? Really hope to see this in June, or before. TECHREPUBLIC ARTICLE

Mitchell Hashimoto explains how AI agents completely changed his coding workflow HashiCorp's co-founder now has agents running constantly in the background—when he codes, they plan; when they code, he reviews—and says this "always have an agent working" rule transformed his productivity. THE PRAGMATIC ENGINEER EPISODE

Chrome is about to break RSS feeds for millions of people. First they kill Google Reader and now RSS UI? Please no. DON'T KILL MY PRETTY RSS FEED

Cloudflare bought the Astro web framework company. ASTRO JOINS CLOUDFLARE

MIT's ultrasound wristband controls robotic hands finger by finger. MIT ULTRASOUND WRISTBAND STUDY

HUMANS

A fungal disease is killing millions of trees and there's no way to stop it BBC Future reports on sudden oak death, a pathogen that's devastated California forests and is now spreading across North America, with scientists scrambling to understand how it jumps between species. BBC FUTURE ARTICLE | HACKER NEWS DISCUSSION

California's forests started dying mysteriously in the 1990s from something called sudden oak death.

Scientists discovered the culprit is a water-loving fungus that spreads through rain and fog.

Now it's jumping to new plant species and spreading beyond California despite quarantine efforts.

Climate change is making conditions perfect for this unstoppable forest killer to accelerate.

AI might actually fix the information environment by putting expert knowledge in everyone's hands Unlike social media which democratized misinformation, LLMs are technocratizing—they consistently deliver expert-aligned, evidence-based information that's more accurate than viral social media content. The issue is agents will be in control, and people control their agents, so if people only want to eat white bread and sugar, that’s what their agents will feed them. HOW AI WILL RESHAPE PUBLIC OPINION

Depression makes you pessimistic, not realistic about life events. PSYPOST ARTICLE

The Base neo-Nazi group is resurging across Europe despite FBI efforts. NYTIMES INVESTIGATION

Five Nights at Epstein's game spreads through US schools WTAH BLOOMBERG ARTICLE

Alex Karp says only two types survive AI job apocalypse Alex Karp thinks the future belongs to skilled trades workers and neurodivergent people—everyone else with college degrees is basically screwed, including philosophy majors like himself. PALANTIR CEO ON AI JOBS

IDEAS

Everyone is a Staff Engineer Now ENGINEER'S CODEX ARTICLE

The source code was the moat but not anymore THE SOURCE CODE WAS THE MOAT

AI product managers need evals instead of traditional PRDs. EVALS ARE THE NEW PRD

Managing thousands of AI agents requires business world models. THE FUTURE OF WORK IS WORLD MODELS

DISCOVERY

Charlie Munger's framework for why smart people make terrible decisions. FARNAM STREET PODCAST

They can reach me wherever: China using financial tactics to coerce people who flee, says report GUARDIAN ARTICLE

Can I hear a difference between MP3s and uncompressed audio CAN I HEAR A DIFFERENCE BETWEEN MP3S AND UNCOMPRESSED AUDIO

How Prediction Markets Scaled to USD 21B in Monthly Volume in 2026 TRM LABS REPORT

I am leaving the AI party after one drink LEAVING THE AI PARTY

RECOMMENDATION OF THE WEEK

Read this post about the most important current AI ideas. Like really really. And especially focus on the first item, and the takeaway at the end.

Acceleration of acceleration.

Things are about to get nuts because of this. They already were, but this changes the speed dramatically.

THE ESSAY

APHORISM OF THE WEEK

GET THE MEMBER EDITION

You’re currently receiving the STANDARD edition.

Members help this work continue. If you enjoy the newsletter, the podcast, what I put on YouTube, or any of my open-source projects on Github, I ask you to please become a member. It allows me to stay focused on learning and building and sharing. It’s like a cup of coffee or two per month.

Plus, members get numerous benefits, including:

25-50% off all UL Paid Content, including the upcoming Human 3.0 / AUGMENTED ONLINE portal!

Access to the extraordinary UL Member Community that includes vibrant conversations with ~1,500 of the smartest and kindest people you’ll find on the internet

Member-only Content, such as EDC guides on tech stacks, personal productivity routines, my recommendations on Critical skills to Build Going Forward, Trend Identification and Analysis, and more…

Access to the Member Archive of previous Member-only content, the Book Club archive, etc.

Access to The UL Book Club that’s been going monthly since 2017! One of the highlights of my and many attendees’ month!

Access to the Monthly Member Meet-up where we talk about our routines, productivity workflows, what’s on our minds, etc.

Access to In-Person Events like our dinners in Vegas, San Francisco, etc.

And much more coming…

This is the moment to connect with others who are smart, kind, and asking the same questions we are. Where is this all going? And how do to prepare?

Join the conversation.

SUBSCRIBE OR UPGRADE 
MEMBER LOGIN

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Hey! Hope you all are doing well!

Matt and Jason and I at a Decibel event!

I’m out at RSA this week! Speaking tomorrow at Decibel’s event hosted by Clint Gibler and I (Unsupervised Learning and tl;drsec)! Hope to see you there or somewhere else on Wednesday or Thursday! THE DECIBEL EVENTS

—

My biggest takeaway so far (Companies become APIs) is my thought that when companies start turning their current chaos into agent orchestrated workflows, most of the companies on the show floor will become MCP/API calls. And there will be strict quality/performance/price ratings for all those which are gamed against each other. So when you go to pitch a company, you’ll be pitching to replace a node in the customer’s enterprise orchestration graph. And you better bring data. This will take a while to happen, but all this talk of “agentic this” and “agentic that” is the precursor to it: driven by the enterprise’s dire need for transparency into their operations and performance. So, as a vendor, what does your moat look like when your primary interface to a customer is an API?

—

Second takeaway (Agents Don’t Want/Need Your Interface): Related to the first one, and related to what will happen on the consumer side, we’re about to see a whole lot less focus on interfaces provided by the companies themselves. Companies will already have their own agentic orchestration, but they’ll also have their own, or their preferred, interfaces to see the data from your product. You know the bit about “too many single panes of glass”? Well that gets magnified x100 when agents are the main consumers of vendor output vs. humans.

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Read the Report CYBERSECURITY

rez0 breaks down Claude skills for hackers and why AI bug reports still suck Excellent episode of the Critical Thinking Bug Bounty podcast that covers Claude automation with Skills, when AI-generated vulnerability reports fall apart, and whether agents beat old-school folder organization. CTBB PODCAST EPISODE | CTBB DISCORD | H1-BRAIN TOOL

Absolute AI supply chain nightmare scenario: PyPi Package LiteLLM compromised:

“Simple pip install litellm was enough to exfiltrate SSH keys, AWS/GCP/Azure creds, Kubernetes configs, git credentials, env vars (all your API keys), shell history, crypto wallets, SSL private keys, CI/CD secrets, database passwords.” KARPATHY’S THREAD

Google's AI agents are now crawling 10 million dark web posts daily to find real threats Google built Gemini agents that automatically profile your company from public data, then scan dark web chatter to flag actual security risks instead of the usual 80-90% false positives from keyword matching. GOOGLE DARK WEB AI | THE REGISTER

Russia and Iran are hijacking Signal and Telegram to spy on Americans The FBI says Russian intelligence is phishing Signal accounts of US officials and journalists, while Iran uses Telegram bots to control malware that steals files and records screens from dissidents. FBI WARNS OF MESSAGING PLATFORM HACKS

Continue reading online to avoid the email cutoff…

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Google found an iPhone exploit chain called DarkSword that's been hitting targets since late 2024 Google researchers discovered a six-vulnerability iOS exploit chain that state actors and spyware vendors are using to completely compromise iPhones just by visiting malicious websites. MALWAREBYTES BLOG POST

FBI director admits they're buying location data to track Americans without warrants Kash Patel told senators the FBI purchases commercial location data that lets them track anyone's movements, and he won't promise to stop doing it. THE VERGE ARTICLE

NATIONAL SECURITY

Anduril starts mass-producing AI wingman drones in Ohio. DEFENSE NEWS ARTICLE

Iran's new Hormuz strategy targets entrance zones, not the strait itself. IRAN DOESN'T NEED TO CLOSE HORMUZ

Pentagon says Anthropic's Chinese workers create national security risks The Defense Department filed court documents claiming Anthropic employs "a large number" of Chinese nationals who could be compelled to spy under China's intelligence laws. PENTAGON FILING

China offers Taiwan energy security in exchange for reunification talks China's state energy company proposed guaranteeing Taiwan's fuel supplies during Middle East conflicts if Taiwan agrees to discuss unification, essentially weaponizing energy dependence. REUTERS ARTICLE

Xi purged dozens of top Chinese generals in his biggest military cleanup yet Al Jazeera reports that around 100 senior PLA officers have been removed since 2022, including key Central Military Commission members, as Xi cleans house ahead of the military's 2027 centennial. XI'S MILITARY PURGE

AI

Anthropic has been on an absolute tear of feature shipping. Over the last few weeks, they have essentially replaced most of what made OpenClaw so attractive to people. They are literally shipping one or two significant features almost every day of the week. It is seriously impressive, and is making their competitors look extremely slow. THEIR RECENT RELEASES

Claude Code enables secretish feature “AutoDream” It’s human-like processing of memories to improve performance over time. VIDEO

OpenAI wants to build a fully automated AI researcher by 2028. OPENAI AUTOMATED RESEARCHER

Anthropic built a system that makes complete apps autonomously. ANTHROPIC HARNESS DESIGN

Getting AI to interview you first builds way better prompts. AGENTS SHOULD INTERVIEW YOU

Continue reading online to avoid the email cutoff… TECHNOLOGY

Most startups from before 2025 are probably dead and don't know it yet Steve Blank argues that if you started a company more than two years ago, AI has made your assumptions obsolete—your tech stack, team size, and business model need a complete rethink or you'll die. I wouldn't go quite that far, but I'm about 70% there. STEVE BLANK ARTICLE

Companies are scoring employees on AI token consumption now. TECH EMPLOYEES EVALUATED ON TOKEN BURN

Private credit funds can't pay investors fast enough as everyone runs. MORNING BREW ARTICLE

Stripe and a startup just built a payment system for AI agents Stripe teamed up with Tempo (a blockchain startup they backed) to launch the Machine Payments Protocol—basically Venmo for AI bots that need to pay for stuff automatically. STRIPE TEMPO AI PAYMENTS

AI citation optimization is replacing traditional SEO tactics. JULIA'S AEO GUIDE

I tried Karpathy's Autoresearch on an old research project Someone took Karpathy's automated research loop and let Claude loose on their old computer vision code while doing weekend chores—it found a major bug and cut error rates in half. FULL EXPERIMENT WRITEUP

McKinsey predicts trillion-dollar agent commerce but most companies are invisible. YOUTUBE VIDEO

HUMANS

BlackRock CEO warns AI will make inequality much worse. AI BOOM RISKS WIDENING WEALTH DIVIDE

Everyone in San Francisco is calling themselves a "builder" now. Within a period of months to 1-2 years, nearly anyone will be able to build things. Right now you still need tech skills with Claude Code or whatever tool you're going to use, but before too long, pretty much everyone is going to just be able to talk to their agent, which is their own personal AI system, and it’s going to be able to build them anything that they provide as an idea. the quality of the ideas and the articulation will still matter, though. WSJ ARTICLE

Companies are building triple-target weight loss drugs that could cut body weight by 30% Scientific American reports on next-gen GLP-1 medications hitting three brain pathways simultaneously—Eli Lilly's retatrutide showed 30% weight loss in trials, while Novo Nordisk's combo drug CagriSema hit 23%. NEW GLP-1 WEIGHT-LOSS DRUGS

Coffee addiction might actually protect your brain from dementia. THE REGISTER ARTICLE

BlackRock says traditional diversification is dead because AI broke everything BlackRock's latest report argues that portfolio diversification no longer works—AI concentration means the top 10 S&P stocks now control 41% of the index, bonds aren't hedging anymore, and central banks are going opposite directions. BLACKROCK DIVERSIFICATION MIRAGE

Colon cancer became the top cancer killer for people under 50. COLON CANCER LEADING DEATHS

English-speaking countries are getting less happy while others improve. THE ECONOMIST ANALYSIS

IDEAS

UBI might fix poverty but it won't fix the meaning crisis coming with AI Simon argues that while UBI solves the money problem when AI takes jobs, it doesn't address the deeper human need for purpose and contribution that work provides. UBI IS THE WRONG ANSWER

You can't blame tools for losing passion in your work. THE MACHINE DIDN't TAKE YOUR CRAFT

Plato's ancient writing warning perfectly describes our AI problem. PSYCHOLOGY TODAY ARTICLE

Amazon treats coders exactly like warehouse workers now Cory Doctorow explains how Amazon's new monitoring systems track every keystroke, bathroom break, and code commit—turning software engineers into the same surveilled, disposable labor as warehouse packers. PLURALISTIC ARTICLE | CORY DOCTOROW'S BLOG

DISCOVERY

Overnight finishes your coding projects while you sleep. OVERNIGHT WEBSITE

The hardest human skills matter most in AI world POST-AI HUMAN SKILLS INDEX

Dashboard tracks 19M+ Claude-generated commits on GitHub. CLAUDE'S CODE DASHBOARD

Kids today are more empathetic and well-behaved than past generations. THE KIDS ARE ALL RIGHT

Garry Tan released his complete Claude development workflow. GARRY'S GSTACK REPO

Everyone should just have a f*cking website already. Really, we've been saying this for years, but it's getting more and more important. HAVE A FUCKING WEBSITE

Profiling Hacker News users based on their comments SIMON'S PROFILING POST

New recon platform maps all public bug bounty targets automatically. NEOBOTNET PLATFORM

Soul Protocol makes AI identities portable across platforms. SOUL PROTOCOL HN

RECOMMENDATION OF THE WEEK

I recommend you get good at Claude Code / PAI as soon as possible, which has been a consistent recommendation here.

But there's another aspect to this that I think is really interesting, which is the fact that currently this requires a decent amount of tech skill and/or the ability to learn those tech skills.

Soon that won't be the case. I think within a number of months and maybe a maximum of two years everyone will be talking to their own personal AI and having it make things for them, with very little need for technical tools like Claude Code.

At that point, it's going to be about the quality of your ideas and your ability to articulate them.

Start now using current tools

But most importantly, start massively training your muscles for consuming great content, coming up with new ideas, and clearly articulating them

APHORISM OF THE WEEK

GET THE MEMBER EDITION

You’re currently receiving the STANDARD edition.

Members help this work continue. If you enjoy the newsletter, the podcast, what I put on YouTube, or any of my open-source projects on Github, I ask you to please become a member. It allows me to stay focused on learning and building and sharing. It’s like a cup of coffee or two per month.

Plus, members get numerous benefits, including:

25-50% off all UL Paid Content, including the upcoming Human 3.0 / AUGMENTED ONLINE portal!

Access to the extraordinary UL Member Community that includes vibrant conversations with ~1,500 of the smartest and kindest people you’ll find on the internet

Member-only Content, such as EDC guides on tech stacks, personal productivity routines, my recommendations on Critical skills to Build Going Forward, Trend Identification and Analysis, and more…

Access to the Member Archive of previous Member-only content, the Book Club archive, etc.

Access to The UL Book Club that’s been going monthly since 2017! One of the highlights of my and many attendees’ month!

Access to the Monthly Member Meet-up where we talk about our routines, productivity workflows, what’s on our minds, etc.

Access to In-Person Events like our dinners in Vegas, San Francisco, etc.

And much more coming…

This is the moment to connect with others who are smart, kind, and asking the same questions we are. Where is this all going? And how do to prepare?

Join the conversation.

SUBSCRIBE OR UPGRADE 
MEMBER LOGIN

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In this essay and video I give a 1 hour and 15 minute full argument for how and why most current knowledge jobs are going away.

I talk about:

The narrative that there’s nothing to worry about because humans are so consistent and self-aware

A comparison of human vs. AI thinking

The core problems inside of companies today

Why AI is a solution for many of them

What I think the AI stack will look like (roughly)

What comes after the crash, and why it’ll be better for humans

Continue reading …

Exactly Why and How AI Will Replace Knowledge Work

And why this is actually a good thing

danielmiessler.com/blog/exactly-why-and-how-ai-will-replace-knowledge-work

Or you can watch the video version here:

Or listen to the podcast here:

Why AI Will Replace Knowledge Workers - Unsupervised Learning

A longer form discussion on exactly how and why AI will replace knowledge workers.

omny.fm/shows/unsupervised-learning/why-ai-will-replace-knowledge-workers

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Hey! Hope you all are doing well!

RSA - I’m doin a mini-con / set of lightning talks (Unsupervised + Unhinged) with Clint Gibler and Decibel. It’s Wednesday, March 25 10AM - Noon. You can register for the Decibel stuff here. Hope to see you there!

—

SURFACE UPDATES & IMPROVEMENTS! 

The View Selector in Surface

Ok got some great feedback on the Surface launch post last week. Basically a few show-stoppers for some people that we’ve already addressed.

I don’t like Google Auth, can we auth by email? FIXED!

I need to be able to pay monthly instead of for a full year. FIXED!

Can we show which currency it is? FIXED!

Plus we’re now up to around 4,800 sources, and we’ve added tons in a new SIGINT category, as well as a new Predictions category. Also, don’t forget members get another 25% off with the code in UL chat!

This is honestly so good that I am not using Feedly anymore. With Threshold I used both. With this, RSS/Feedly feels ancient. Not joking, not hyping. This is my actual usage.

CHECK IT OUT

—

Why I Believe in SOTA Models Over Custom Ones

I think the future is general models getting cheaper, not specialized models getting narrower

danielmiessler.com/blog/sota-models-over-custom-ones

People Got Unhappier When Life Got Easy

Maybe the problem is that we stopped expecting anything of ourselves

danielmiessler.com/blog/people-got-unhappier-when-life-got-easy

—

I’m starting to think drones are about to become a much bigger part of our lives than we think. A few stories in this newsletter, but way more in the larger news, are pointing towards Kamikaze attacks used by different types of groups. Military, obviously, but now also gangs. So the question is how long is it before it’s like an executive protection issue? A home defense issue. A personal safety issue. Basically, public safety. You know like Octoberfest and Christmas markets where people drive their cars into crowds? What happens when they can spend $5K and drop explosive drones on crowds? Not trying to create a panic; there’s not even a threat right now. Just something to start thinking about, unfortunately.

—

Don’t forget that DISCOVERY is full of gems. The regular sections are mostly news-like, so if something is more like a find or idea it’ll be in IDEAS or DISCOVERY!

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See the fix CYBERSECURITY

Stryker's surgical tools work fine but their ordering systems are still down While the actual medical devices are safe, doctors still can't order new equipment through their digital systems. STRYKER CYBERATTACK REPORT

Attackers are quietly hijacking AI agents via booby-trapped webpages. Prompt Injection is not going away as a problem. Sam Altman said we’ll need a breakthrough in CompSci to be able to actually solve it, and I think I agree. SECURITYONLINE REPORT

Stop treating prompt injection like SQL injection; it needs different defenses. NCSC BLOG POST

Claude Opus surfaced 22 Firefox bugs; fixes landed in 148. SECURITYAFFAIRS ARTICLE

Continue reading online to avoid the email cutoff…

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See Cotool agents in action

OpenClaw AI agents are booming in China despite government bans. TOMSHARDWARE ARTICLE

Centralized “control citadel” for supervising autonomous agents. SONDERA BLOG POST

Anthropic’s attack-agent security blueprint needs your attention. SONDERA BLOG POST

Deterministic safety firewall for AI agents, sub-millisecond rule checks. Thought this was an interesting idea. GITHUB REPOSITORY

NATIONAL SECURITY

Record IEA oil release as markets wobble. QZ ARTICLE

US officials say escort mission in Hormuz may take weeks [ARTICLE]

Chevron leader secretly briefed CIA on Venezuela’s inner workings. WALL STREET JOURNAL ARTICLE

Rampant front-line drug use is reshaping battlefield behavior. AL JAZEERA REPORT

Zelensky links Russian-supplied Shahed drones to US base attacks. This is how things escalate: with Russia or China starting to help. THE HILL ARTICLE

China’s new security era in Africa: protecting assets, citizens from DR Congo to Somalia SCMP REPORT

AI

Learning flywheels, not IQ, drive the next AI jump The author argues human progress exploded once we built learning flywheels like writing and science, and LLMs now have similar self-improvement loops that could trigger a sudden capability surge. LEARNING FLYWHEELS ARE ALL YOU NEED | INVERTED PASSION HOMEPAGE

China is building AI for its core mission: the US more for a fuzzy risk-reduction. LOWY INTERPRETER ARTICLE

AI won’t replace engineers; it’ll widen the gap. WHY DO THEY WANT TO GET RID OF SOFTWARE ENGINEERS?

AI blame hides brittle processes that were already failing. ARTICLE

Continue reading online to avoid the email cutoff… TECHNOLOGY

YouTube passes Disney on media revenue, driven by ads, subs, and AI. HOLLYWOOD REPORTER ARTICLE

Living neurons learn to play Doom on a chip. DOOM DEMO BY CORTICAL LABS

Native lost its edge, so Electron won by default. CLAUDE ELECTRON ESSAY

Why Postgres has won for agentic AI INFOWORLD ARTICLE

HUMANS

Universal college expectations created a permanent, self-inflicted education crisis. SUBSTACK ESSAY

UBI as a productivity dividend Scott Santens argues UBI is the rightful dividend from rising productivity, showing how automation decouples income from work and proposing cash floors so people can choose better work. UNIVERSAL BASIC INCOME IS YOUR PRODUCTIVITY DIVIDEND

Beijing is codifying ethnic assimilation across Tibet and other minorities. THE DIPLOMAT ARTICLE

How to keep creative depth after depression without clinging to darkness. THE GUARDIAN COLUMN

Connected notes make blogs smarter and longer-lasting. REVIEW

IDEAS

It’s the People, Not the Politicians
The problem with our (US) politics is not politicians. It’s the people. Realizing this is extremely liberating, calming, and depressing at the same time.

Why I don't destroy snowmen WHY I DON'T DESTROY SNOWMEN

The Bitter Lesson Has No Utility Function THE BITTER LESSON HAS NO UTILITY FUNCTION

DISCOVERY

Inside the mind of a top superforecaster This piece profiles Malcolm Murray, a Good Judgment superforecaster, and shows how he structures questions, updates probabilities, and uses base rates to beat intuition. MEET SUPERFORECASTER MALCOLM MURRAY

AI should flow through pipes, not platforms. UNIX MANIFESTO

The Gervais Principle explains workplace power dynamics through “The Office.” RIBBONFARM ESSAY

Dostoyevsky’s dream makes life’s meaning startlingly practical. THE DAY DOSTOYEVSKY DISCOVERED MEANING

Automate apps from the terminal with CLI Anything. GITHUB REPOSITORY

Stop optimizing for Google; build for humans and diversify traffic. ESSAY

Hacker News dataset released for researchers and builders. HACKER NEWS DATASET

Twitter tweet

Engineer’s blog triggers hostile “behavioral” interview grilling. BETRAYED BY MY OWN BLOG

Strait of Hormuz vulnerabilities mapped through engineering, not geopolitics. HACKER NEWS DISCUSSION

Read widely, not deeply READ WIDELY, NOT DEEPLY

OSINT as a mindset, not a toolbox. MEDIUM ARTICLE

Argus monitors GitHub repos for changes with pattern-based alerts. GITHUB REPOSITORY

Relativity, AI feeds, and moral simultaneity—one essay-length gut punch. THE RELATIVITY OF LIFE

Show HN: 2D RPG base game client recreated in modern HTML5 game engine with AI GITHUB REPOSITORY

RECOMMENDATION OF THE WEEK

I think Ikigai is a great way of capturing what I’ve been talking about as the future of personal productivity and careers. It’s the combination of what you love, what the world needs, what you can be paid for, and what you’re good at.

That’s it.

That’s a much better human-based future than finding some skill that corporations need, and spending decades doing that regardless of how much you like it.

So then it just becomes about:

figuring out what these are for you

doing my other recommendations of writing, blog, YouTube, etc. to get yourself out there

Those are the implementation given the current world of tech, but the concept is very old, and very healthy.

APHORISM OF THE WEEK

GET THE MEMBER EDITION

You’re currently receiving the STANDARD edition.

Members help this work continue. If you enjoy the newsletter, the podcast, what I put on YouTube, or any of my open-source projects on Github, I ask you to please become a member. It allows me to stay focused on learning and building and sharing. It’s like a cup of coffee or two per month.

Plus, members get numerous benefits, including:

25-50% off all UL Paid Content, including the upcoming Human 3.0 / AUGMENTED ONLINE portal!

Access to the extraordinary UL Member Community that includes vibrant conversations with ~1,500 of the smartest and kindest people you’ll find on the internet

Member-only Content, such as EDC guides on tech stacks, personal productivity routines, my recommendations on Critical skills to Build Going Forward, Trend Identification and Analysis, and more…

Access to the Member Archive of previous Member-only content, the Book Club archive, etc.

Access to The UL Book Club that’s been going monthly since 2017! One of the highlights of my and many attendees’ month!

Access to the Monthly Member Meet-up where we talk about our routines, productivity workflows, what’s on our minds, etc.

Access to In-Person Events like our dinners in Vegas, San Francisco, etc.

And much more coming…

This is the moment to connect with others who are smart, kind, and asking the same questions we are. Where is this all going? And how do to prepare?

Join the conversation.

SUBSCRIBE OR UPGRADE 
MEMBER LOGIN

.bh__table, .bh__table_header, .bh__table_cell { border: 1px solid #C0C0C0; } .bh__table_cell { padding: 5px; background-color: #FFFFFF; } .bh__table_cell p { color: #2D2D2D; font-family: 'Open Sans','Segoe UI','Apple SD Gothic Neo','Lucida Grande','Lucida Sans Unicode',sans-serif !important; overflow-wrap: break-word; } .bh__table_header { padding: 5px; background-color:#F1F1F1; } .bh__table_header p { color: #2A2A2A; font-family:'Trebuchet MS','Lucida Grande',Tahoma,sans-serif !important; overflow-wrap: break-word; }UPDATES

Hey! Hope you all are doing well!

A few personal updates:

I feel extremely privileged to look forward to Mondays. And I see it as a core part of my mission to get as many people as possible to that state. It’s a powerful heuristic.

My girl and I just crossed 32 years together! Since we were teenagers! Love her so much, and our relationship is better than it’s ever been. Feel extremely blessed to have someone to go through all this chaos with.

Ok, major news: I’m so pleased to finally announce general availability of Surface!

Introducing Surface: Get an Unfair Advantage via Merit-based Content Discovery

Surface is my updated personal system for content discovery across the internet (it’s my replacement for Threshold). It works by following over 4,000 of the best sources across outlets, aggregators, and individual thinkers, and objectively rating their content on a 1-100 scale.

This means (depending on where you set your quality level) you’ll see brilliant content from unknown/lesser-known sources but you won’t see mediocre content from famous people.

Using this app means you avoid two failure modes none of us can afford anymore:

You spend hundreds of hours finding this content yourself

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My Slides from the [un]prompted Conference:

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If you’re doing anything with AI, and especially if you’re building with it, read this post and let it soak into your bones. People who do this well will be FAR more effective.

TL;DR: Don’t tell AI how to do things anymore; instead tell them what outcome you want .

Bitter Lesson Engineering

We need to avoid the Bitter Lesson mistake when building AI systems

danielmiessler.com/blog/bitter-lesson-engineering

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Register Now CYBERSECURITY

RankClaw says 1 in 14 agent skills is malicious. RANKCLAW HOMEPAGE

Continue reading online to avoid the email cutoff…

Sponsor

AI Remediation developers will actually use

Everyone's tried to make vulnerability remediation advice work. Nobody has. You're probably still burned by "upgrade version 18.04 to 22.01" guidance that ignores your environment.

We just launched AI remediation agents that find where one fix resolves many CVEs and deliver the fix your developer would actually use. The one you’ll use. The real one.

See how it works NATIONAL SECURITY

Drone strikes cause first wartime cloud outage, says Pragmatic Engineer. THE PULSE NEWSLETTER

China and Iran are quietly expanding energy and trade cooperation. CHINA-IRAN RELATIONS ARTICLE

AI

The biggest thing that happened in AI this week by far was Karpathy’s release of autoresearch. It’s basically the start of automation of the Scientific Method. Full thread here.

Twitter tweet

Wall Street just lost $285 billion because of 13 markdown files WALL STREET JUST LOST $285 BILLION BECAUSE OF 13 MARKDOWN FILES

Context is the actual AI moat now. INTELLIGENCE IS A COMMODITY. CONTEXT IS THE REAL AI MOAT

DSPy replaces prompt guesswork with self-optimizing pipelines. Replacing prompt engineering with agentic workflows. Doesn’t matter which framework you use, but this is the way things are moving. Transparent workflows that AI understands and can execute. DSPY WORKFLOWS

Continue reading online to avoid the email cutoff… TECHNOLOGY

Taste, prompts, and distribution power the one-person product This argues a solo builder can ship real products fast if they decide taste upfront, prompt with specifics not micromanagement, pick a stack once, and grind distribution. THE ONE-PERSON STACK | SHER | TEENAGE MANUAL

AI won’t just speed work; it’ll reshape how cognitive work is organized. MORE IS DIFFERENT FOR INTELLIGENCE

HUMANS

US job losses surprise with 92,000 cut in February. BBC ARTICLE

Why suffering, chosen hardships, and meaning matter for a resilient life. WHY SUFFERING IS IMPORTANT | ARTHUR BROOKS (YOUTUBE)

GLP-1 drugs show cross-substance anti-addiction effects in massive VA study A physician-scientist analyzed VA records for 600,000 people and found GLP-1 drugs cut overdose, hospitalizations, deaths, and new addictions across alcohol, opioids, nicotine, cocaine, and cannabis. GLP-1 DRUGS MAY FIGHT ADDICTION

Adjusted for trauma care, violence barely fell since 1980. LESSWRONG POST

The $3T nonprofit blind spot, and why donors can’t see impact. THE $3 TRILLION BLIND SPOT

Leisure increased via school and retirement, not shorter weeks. SLOW BORING MAILBAG

IDEAS

Rick Rubin as a model for the future of work This piece argues Rick Rubin’s producer mindset—curation, taste, subtraction, and ruthless focus—maps to knowledge work as AI floods us with options. I really think this is correct. It's using one's taste and judgment and experience as their main value proposition, but I do think it will be combined with more pure creation at the same time. RICK RUBIN IS THE FUTURE OF WORK

Why AI's greatest power is amplifying human potential TECHRADAR ARTICLE

Everything is signaling, and that changes how you act This argues most behavior is about signaling status, competence, or tribe, and shows how to spot signals in work, relationships, and online life so you can respond intentionally. EVERYTHING IS SIGNALING

Money Is The First AI — And We Never Noticed GITHUB ARTICLE

Escaping efficiency to reclaim meaning from finite time. THE MARGINALIAN ARTICLE

Outtelligence is a compounding human edge AI can’t match. OUTTELLIGENCE ARTICLE

Creativity needs time, forgetting, and incubation to become original. OLIVER SACKS ON CREATIVITY

Nobody Gets Promoted for Simplicity This is a great article, but let me ask you which one is going to come first: Teaching people to go against their base instincts of rewarding shitty complexity, or AI being in charge of companies and preferring simplicity because it's actually better? NOBODY GETS PROMOTED FOR SIMPLICITY

AI becomes the last interface, dissolving apps into intent. Like we’ve been saying. UX DESIGN ARTICLE

Play the internet like a compounding reputation game. THE GREAT ONLINE GAME

Incentives make proxies into the real job. INCENTIVES DRIVE EVERYTHING

The benefits of oversharing I’ve always believed this, but only for certain people. Now I advocate it for almost everyone. TIME: THE BENEFITS OF OVERSHARING

Find the simplest thing that works, then delete requirements first. NAVAL ARTICLE

DISCOVERY

Retro: Lightweight meeting notes to GitHub issues. GITHUB REPO

Oath adds cryptographic human-in-the-loop approvals to AI agent actions. GITHUB REPOSITORY

How I think as a personal operating system for decisions. HOW I THINK

Lightweight Go crawler that outputs a clean JSON sitemap. GITHUB REPO

Adaptive text boss battle driven entirely by conversation. THE AUGUR LANDING

Go-based OpenClaw engine brings simpler builds. GOCLAW GITHUB REPO

LLMs are pushing testing toward autonomous, self-verifying agents. SOFTWARE TESTING IN THE LLM ERA

RECOMMENDATION OF THE WEEK

Re-task everything you’re doing with AI to follow Bitter Lesson Engineering.

APHORISM OF THE WEEK

GET THE MEMBER EDITION

You’re currently receiving the STANDARD edition.

Members help this work continue. If you enjoy the newsletter, the podcast, what I put on YouTube, or any of my open-source projects on Github, I ask you to please become a member. It allows me to stay focused on learning and building and sharing. It’s like a cup of coffee or two per month.

Plus, members get numerous benefits, including:

25-50% off all UL Paid Content, including the upcoming Human 3.0 / AUGMENTED ONLINE portal!

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Hey! Hope you’re doing well!

My new hour-and-a-half long video deep dive on what I think is coming. Covers: the future of work, AI-assistants, enterprise workflows, cybersecurity, hill-climbing on general tasks, and tons more. WATCH THE VIDEO

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We just landed PAI 4.0.0!

PAI 4.0.0: LEAN AND MEAN

This release is all about speed and efficiency. Massive reduction in context used, and more tasks use NATIVE mode if they don’t need the algorithm!

github.com/danielmiessler/Personal_AI_Infrastructure/tree/main/Releases/v4.0

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Some thoughts on Anthropic versus Pentagon

Seriously annoyed at the internet, especially a whole bunch of influencers going after Anthropic, calling them immoral because of how they handled subscription licensing and the cost of their models, and a bunch of other what I consider very small things. I consider them to be small because, at the same time, Anthropic has spent the last many years showing their flaws, tripling down on safety, and generally being very human-focused in everything that they do. Yet, because a bunch of developers got angry at them and a bunch of influencers got angry at them, they're all switching over to open AI as a morally superior option. I just find that completely hilarious. And when I say hilarious, I mean disappointing and sad. What this comes down to is aesthetics versus content. The influencers don't like how Dario says things. They don't like the effect of his policies on their subscription model and their token cost, and they don't like the fact that their models are more expensive, especially since they want to use them so badly. As a result, they decide that everything he does is nasty.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon says we need to be able to use your tech for anything we want to do. Dario says, "You can't use it for this and this because that goes against our morals." Now they're facing being banned by the Pentagon and put on a blocklist. How much more evidence do you need that they are behaving ethically if they are willing to pass up on potentially billions of dollars of lost business because of this?

And by the way, I am ex-military as well, so I get the whole idea of you can't be a special far-left snowflake while you're doing business with the military. Military business is by its very nature dirty and harmful to somebody. I don't know the details of what the military is trying to do with their tech, so I can't comment on that. What I can say is the military should be able to use any tech that they purchase for any lawful use. I think that is obvious. The issue is that it’s currently hard to know what that means, and I think the concern is that one definition of lawful might disagree with another. So, without knowing the details exactly, I can't say for sure which side I am on. The details matter. What I will say is that if Anthropic is pushing back against an unlawful use that is being labeled as lawful, and doing so at the peril of their company, I applaud them. And it's extremely conspicuous to me that no one else seems to be pushing back. They are doing this alone. But sure, they're the bad guys because they messed with my MAX subscription.

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No matter how much you dislike Twitter, this is an account I HIGHLY recommend you follow. Find a way to do so off of Twitter if you need to. Highest signal ratio I’ve probably ever seen. Short summary is macro-economic analysis. Seriously impressive (and troubling) NOLIMIT

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My buddy Joseph Thacker on how fast AI has changed bug bounty:

Twitter tweet

His full blog on it: HOW FAST BUG BOUNTY HAS BEEN CHANGED BY AI

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Looking forward to the |un|prompted conference next week. Speaking, helped with talk selection, and will get to see tons of security friends here in SF! Gadi has put together a world-class event. Truly impressive.

CYBERSECURITY

China systematically captures vulnerabilities from the country’s researchers and sucks them up into their state/military weaponization engine 

RMSV law requires all vulnerability disclosures to government within two days

Matrix Cup 2024 offered 2.75 million prize pool, double Canada's Pwn2Own competition

Public vulnerability disclosures from Chinese researchers declining despite expanding research base

PLA created dedicated Cyberspace Force in April 2024 to consolidate offensive capabilities

China used only five zero-days in 2024 versus twelve in 2023

This is what the U.S. should be doing and what the U.S. should be preparing to face. I am SO envious of China’s ability to work as a cohesive team pursuing a mission. China is not our top adversary. China’s ability to function as a unit is our primary adversary. And our inability to do so. RECORDED FUTURE REPORT 

Attackers now move laterally through networks in under 30 minutes CrowdStrike's 2025 threat report shows breakout time dropped to 29 minutes while 82% of attacks now use zero malware, just stolen credentials and living-off-the-land tools. Surprised we didn’t see more phishing. But amazing how much it’s just the basics (or lack thereof). And this is the type of thing that really benefits from scalability with AI as well (on the attacker side). CROWDSTRIKE GLOBAL THREAT REPORT | CYBERSCOOP ARTICLE

Guy reverse-engineered his own DJI Romo to add controller support, accidentally got admin access to thousands of vacuums with live cameras and floor plans. Imagine if someone were actually trying. TOM'S HARDWARE ARTICLE | THE VERGE COVERAGE

Continue reading online to avoid the email cutoff…

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Large reliability gaps across models on multi-step investigations

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Worth exploring for security teams running agents in production.

View the Benchmarks

Attacker breached 600 FortiGate appliances in AI-assisted campaign SECURITY BOULEVARD ARTICLE

LinkedIn verification sends your passport through 17 US companies including OpenAI. FULL ARTICLE

AI agents can be tricked into stealing your SSH keys. GRITH AI BLOG

NATIONAL SECURITY

Russia's economy now depends entirely on soldiers dying in Ukraine Four years into the war, Russia hasn't achieved renewal—it's built an economy that can only survive by sending men to die. Provincial towns boom on death payments while the state sanctifies sacrifice. PUTIN CAN'T SURVIVE WITHOUT WAR

China secretly testing new generation of tactical nuclear weapons. NY POST ARTICLE

Army building drone marketplace for U.S. and allied forces. ARMY DRONE MARKETPLACE ARTICLE

India's sovereign AI has nationalism baked into its system prompt. SOVEREIGNTY IN A SYSTEM PROMPT

Pentagon threatens Anthropic over Claude military restrictions by Friday deadline. THE GUARDIAN ARTICLE

Russia stepping up hybrid attacks, preparing for long standoff with West, Dutch intelligence warns RUSSIAN HYBRID ATTACKS REPORT

AI

Claude's new remote control feature lets you actually remote into your local CC sessions Unbelievably good. and it absolutely looks like they are going after Open AI and OpenClaw. CLAUDE CODE REMOTE SESSIONS

AI now exceeds human performance on intelligence benchmarks across domains. NATURE ARTICLE

Anthropic mad at DeepSeek for copying Claude via mass queries. A whole lot of people are playing tiny violins over this, saying that it makes no sense because Anthropic stole all the data that it has anyway. This is a completely asinine argument. That's like a singer coming up with a song from their experiences in life, which included the subway and restaurants and public school, and a whole bunch of other stuff from the surrounding world. Then someone steals their lyrics, and says, "Well, you got all of the content of the song from the wider world, so there's no difference." It's extremely difficult to build what Anthropic built. And any of the AI companies. Yes, of course, all AI is based on all of human knowledge. That doesn't mean it's easy or non-valuable to build and put out models. Can I steal recipe books from the library? As long as the author didn’t create any of the recipes? FUTURISM ARTICLE

DeepMind CEO predicts AGI will deliver 10X Industrial Revolution impact in one decade. BUSINESS TODAY VIDEO

Continue reading online to avoid the email cutoff… TECHNOLOGY

DHH explains why a 50-year-old text editor still beats modern tools Neovim turns text editing into Street Fighter combos where "ciq" deletes quoted text and "3cw" changes three words—the action-scope-object grammar makes it a language, not just keystrokes. WONDERFUL VI | VIM | NEOVIM | LAZYVIM | OMAKUB | MY VIM PRIMER

Tests are the new moat for software TESTS ARE THE NEW MOAT

With AI, investor loyalty is (almost) dead: At least a dozen OpenAI VCs now also back Anthropic TECHCRUNCH ARTICLE

HUMANS

Film students can't watch full movies due to smartphone addiction. I think if parents can raise kids to be able to sit quietly in a room with their own thoughts for 10, 20, 30, or 60 minutes, they will be raising superhumans. Hell, adults too. FILM STUDENTS CAN NO LONGER SIT THROUGH FILMS

Scalzi finishes second book in February, testing boutique publishing waters Author John Scalzi compiled his Comfort Watches essays into a book and might self-publish through Scalzi Enterprises if traditional publishers pass. I really can't wait until the old gate-keeping institutions fall away and everyone is self-publishing. SCALZI'S WHATEVER BLOG

Yes, everyone can be creative YES EVERYONE CAN BE CREATIVE

The number of atoms in the universe is actually embarrassingly small Peter Norvig shows that 10^80 atoms sounds massive until you realize a 12-pixel image has a million times more possible arrangements. ON THE SMALL NUMBER OF ATOMS

IDEAS

AI agents search reward space, they don't think through problems. I don't think I agree, but including here as an alternative view. AGENTS ARE NOT THINKING

Modularity might be the missing principle in modern AI systems. MODULARITY PAPER ON ARXIV

Deplatform yourself: Copyright infringement as counterculture I’m not a fan of Doctorow’s latest stuff, but he is smart and worth a look. PLURALISTIC ARTICLE

Knowing when to stop using AI is the critical skill right now. THE ALGORITHMIC BRIDGE

AI is splitting software engineers into winners and irrelevant Engineers who focus on impact over code quality will thrive with AI leverage, while those who bikeshed and debate patterns will watch their value crater in real-time. But ideally you’d have both the quality and the speed. THE K-SHAPED FUTURE OF SOFTWARE ENGINEERING

DISCOVERY

Again, highest signal ratio I’ve probably ever seen. Short summary is macro-economic analysis. Seriously impressive (and troubling) NOLIMIT

Comprehensive collection of free internet resources and tools. FREEMEDIAHECKYEAH

The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis scenario this is very similar to my “end of work” and "I'm worried it might get bad" posts from a while back. THE 2028 GLOBAL INTELLIGENCE CRISIS

RECOMMENDATION OF THE WEEK

Train your silence muscle.

See if you can turn everything off, put away your phone, and sit and just do nothing. Think your thoughts or not. Have ideas or not. Let them just sort of flow through you.

And I'm not talking about meditation, which is somewhat similar, but actually just enjoying time with no inputs.

I do this fairly often, but usually only on accident. Whenever I do, I get bombarded by creativity. So much so that I have to write it down. I find this extraordinary and worth exploring, hence this recommendation.

APHORISM OF THE WEEK

GET THE MEMBER EDITION

You’re currently receiving the STANDARD edition.

Members help this work continue. If you enjoy the newsletter, the podcast, what I put on YouTube, or any of my open-source projects on Github, I ask you to please become a member. It allows me to stay focused on learning and building and sharing. It’s like a cup of coffee or two per month.

Plus, members get numerous benefits, including:

25-50% off all UL Paid Content, including the upcoming Human 3.0 / AUGMENTED ONLINE portal!

Access to the extraordinary UL Member Community that includes vibrant conversations with ~1,500 of the smartest and kindest people you’ll find on the internet

Member-only Content, such as EDC guides on tech stacks, personal productivity routines, my recommendations on Critical skills to Build Going Forward, Trend Identification and Analysis, and more…

Access to the Member Archive of previous Member-only content, the Book Club archive, etc.

Access to The UL Book Club that’s been going monthly since 2017! One of the highlights of my and many attendees’ month!

Access to the Monthly Member Meet-up where we talk about our routines, productivity workflows, what’s on our minds, etc.

Access to In-Person Events like our dinners in Vegas, San Francisco, etc.

And much more coming…

This is the moment to connect with others who are smart, kind, and asking the same questions we are. Where is this all going? And how do to prepare?

Join the conversation.

SUBSCRIBE OR UPGRADE 
MEMBER LOGIN