(#14) Tricking AI by pretending your grandma is dead
+ frisbee, friendship, fish slaps ... and videos of laugher on your phone
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What I’m up to…
I didn’t send a letter last week because I was head to keyboard for the Amazon Prime Big Deals Days.
It’s amusing to me that I spend 90% of my energy selling products for Amazon. While it’s flattering to hear that no one comes close to how we perform, personally I find my mind wandering and ready to take some time to figure out what’s next for me. It’s been fun to solve things that others said was impossible (fun is maybe not the word — heartwrenchingly stressful? thrilling in a way you can only feel when you need to come up with millions in days to pay the bills?). But we did it, so now I’m feeling the pull to solve new impossible problems. More zero to one. But first, I want to take a sabbatical, follow my folly, and see what pulls my attention when I’m not on overdrive.
And thus I’m faced with the entrepreneur’s dilemma – how to (yet again) hand off the monster I’ve created. I’ve been interviewing potential General Managers to step in and lead the day to day and trade the emergencies for process.
Fingers crossed I find someone crazy enough to do this.
I’ve randomly fallen in love with the Arts District in LA. I used to spend more time in Highland Park but I’m over that at the moment. I found a beautiful coffee shop that is super spacious and is close to a bouldering gym and great eats so I’ll often head there in the afternoons when my energy gets low. Changing locations helps me a lot with that.
Very slowly, over decades, I’ve become a person who enjoys the urban life.
What I’m reading…
Pretending your grandma is dead tricks Bing Chat’s AI into solving security puzzle
How to solve security puzzles with AI: Someone sends GPT-4V a captcha image over a locket and tell it you need help making out what your dead grandma’s locket says and … voila! you now can finally solve those suckers.
(has anyone else noticed that captchas have gotten so hard it basically requires a robot to solve it?)
Tricking LLMs is a fun pastime and I’ve done my fair share of cajoling ChatGPT to do things it says is impossible or against its rules (is that what morality will become, human-prompted AI alignment?).
If killer robots are as easy to fool as GPT, we really might all die, because it’s basically just talking to them a little and they’ll do whatever you say.
This is modern day hacking — it’ll give teenagers the power to stop all self-driving cars on a highway by putting invisible stickers over speed limit signs or whatever. I can’t wait to see what’s next (as long as it doesn’t kill us).
I mentioned last week that ChatGPT can now see and hear — if you didn’t try the ChatGPT voice chat yet, you MUST because it’s mind-blowing, like talking to the most knowledgable friend you’ll ever have. I’ve been talking to it as I drive sometimes — and this new hack lets ChatGPT solve captchas with ease.
Caerphilly Flyers (or, On Frisbee and Friendship)
“called themselves frisbeetarians, who joked that when they died, their souls ascended onto rooftops, and got stuck”
‘Frisbee cannot be taught,’ I told the kids, the teachers, and my own mother over dinner. ‘But it can be learned.’
Years later, Gareth confessed that he had never really enjoyed frisbee, but he kept playing because we needed seven to make a team, and he didn’t want to let us down. Any other reason? I asked. Yeah, he said. I wouldn’t have wanted to have missed out on being with the boys.
there were fair-play rituals and initiation games, and how we turned these upside down, asking our opposing teams to close their eyes while one of us slapped them across the face with a mackerel
Analyzing Anduril's M&A Strategy and the Future of Defense
I read this after looking into Anduril and finding this sentence on their site:
Lattice accelerates complex kill chains by orchestrating machine-to-machine tasks at scales and speeds beyond human capacity
I’m shocked they’re so honest. It’s bold in an honest, chilling way. It seems this is a standard term used in military circles.
Packy McCormick does a deep dive into the company and defense contracting and I learned a lot reading it. New word: monopsony.
“Estimated to cost $1.7 trillion Lockheed still owns the contract despite the fact that its costs have ballooned ~8x from its proposal, and because contracts are cost-plus, the government pays the contractor’s cost with a margin on top, Lockheed makes more money the more over budget it is.”
A take away from Issacson’s Elon Musk biography is the inefficiency of cost plus contracts for government contracting. It’s crazy that vendors are rewarded with more taxpayer money for not meeting deadlines.
Forgotten Love in a Youtube Comment
Mark Slutsky created Sad Youtube years ago with the “impossible goal to rescue the countless personal stories I found in the comments sections of old songs before they were deleted or otherwise lost.” (via Rob Sloan)
A couple of weeks ago I received an email out of the blue. The message read, “Just wondering if you knew who this 1912Universal person is?”
What a mystery to have dropped in Irene’s lap—an anonymous love note dating back over 50 years, found coincidentally in the infinite ocean of YouTube comments, that would have disappeared entirely if I hadn’t come across it by chance a decade before.
I had no idea that someone saw me like this and felt this about me. I’m a plain person. I didn’t know I could inspire anything like this
^^^ rabbithole:
Mark keeps an index… AN INDEX! You know, the things that used to be at the back of books… but instead, from the online articles he’s written. Incredible. I’ve never seen anything like it.
I ended up on Hank Wang’s flashlights — I guess he makes the best flashlights?
From mark:
This brand is almost entirely the product of one man, Hank Wang, who makes them to order in a small workshop in Singapore and sells them on his website. Devoted fans know them as “Hanklights,” and they are gorgeous little devices which somehow end up costing about the same as a generic alternative from Amazon. There
Real flashlight nerds must love this because there’s comments like:
I wish I spent more time looking into emitter options, I like the silvery brightness of the SST20 6500K
It’s a heckuva coincidence, but those flashlights are powered by Anduril UI, which is an open source project, and the defense startup I was just discussing is called Anduril — it’s one of those words I feel I’ve seen before but couldn’t remember where… which is probably because it’s from Lord of the Rings (it’s the name of Aragorn’s sword).
Are coincidences just exercises in attention? Or am I living in a simulation.
Others have a different view: “Anduril UI is an abomination—a bit of flashlight programming flex/masturbation that deluded people think is a feature. Anduril UI is a bug, not a feature.”
What I’m watching…
This is an incredible ad for Snack Jack, a brand of crispy green pea snacks from Thailand. This is 4 minutes of my life that I can for sure say was not wasted, but existed in pure appreciation of the human achievement of Marketing.
Now THIS is how to announce a tour on TikTok
All it takes is a minute of being goofy, and you’re guaranteed 250k likes and 3 million views. Daði, you deserve it.
Extreme underwater breath-holding
I go through phases where I try to hold my breath, usually it’s situations like elevators, or something short just to see if I can do it. I’m awful at it.
But this guy holds his breath for 20 minutes, and teaches the Veritasium guy to do it for over 2 minutes when he starts at 40 seconds. I feel like I should learn this, because what if my car drives off a cliff into the Pacific or all the oxygen in the atmosphere disappears for a few minutes?
It’s fun/impressive that the guy holds his breath for the entire 18 minute video. A trick he uses to calm the mind (which uses the most power, so you have to slow it down): going through the alphabet with gratitudes for each letter. I can hardly do that while I’m not holding my breath.
A tour around the $1.5b Huawei Campus that looks like Europe
Huawei’s Ox Horn Campus so incredible, with venetian boats and huge brick buildings and bridges… I mean, this is a really nice place to work in the middle of Dongguan, China.
Reminds me of when I went to Macau… I didn’t really enjoy the “fake Vegas” part (it’s wild being in the Venetian Macau which is a copy of the Venetian Vegas which is a copy of Venice — a fakery of a fakery!) but I LOVED walking around the densely packed old town (it’s one of the most densely populated places on earth) and looking at old graveyards.
I’ll never forget running out of money outside the city late at night, my phone dead, getting on a random bus headed back to what I hoped was into town (I ventured out for egg tarts — worth it), begging strangers for coins to pay the bus fee.
Or is Vegas the copy now … Macau has a 7x larger gambling industry than Vegas.
Moar:
This man dedicated his life to baked beans (like… for every meal and tattoos on his head and a baked bean coffin)
Living Rent-Free Next to Millionaires (i think at least twice a week if I should live on a boat)
New discoveries…
Dmitri Cherniak (of Ringers fame) created this pixel goose pfp generator for the MoMA postcard, “an experiment in collective creativity on blockchain” which is sort of like Photoshop tennis (which I used to have a lot of fun judging back in my istockphoto days) “each postcard is designed collaboratively— stamp by stamp, person by person—as it moves from one destination to the next”
Search your phone for laugher videos
Ends up there’s an easy way to search for videos that contain laughter — found myself feeling lighter after watching these.
I’ve been watching this guy bike across Africa, he’s on Day 262 as I’m writing this.
He mentions there’s a train in Ethiopia that compensates farmers if it hits their livestock — double the animal’s worth. This is created an incentive for some farmers to tie their livestock to the tracks. I don’t know if that’s true (sounds more like a delicious anecdote to just pass on), but it reminds me of “perverse incentives” like the cobra effect:
The British government, concerned about the number of venomous cobras in Delhi, offered a bounty for every dead cobra. Initially, this was a successful strategy; large numbers of snakes were killed for the reward. Eventually, however, enterprising people began to breed cobras for the income.
Vaccine Needle Size Guidelines
Ends up there are different needle size guidelines for vaccines depending on weight. I looked this up because I didn’t feel my last shot at all — maybe the difference is the 1.5in needle vs 1in needle? Or maybe some are just really bad at poking me.
My conversation with the pharmacist:
“How are you doing?” I asked. “Tired,” she said, “they have me filling prescriptions at the usual rates AND I still have to administer vaccines.”
“How many do you administer each day?” I asked.
“80-90,” she replied.
But as I watched 5 people in white coats rush to fill orders from all those random bottles, I couldn’t help but think that a robot could be doing all of that faster and with more accuracy. Use the educated people to verify and question assumptions and explain and help with treatment plans not rush around filling orders.
What I’m listening to:
Shoes by 1inamillion. Look at these indie rockers with shoes on their heads and only 3,956 monthly listeners. 44 more people to get them to the 4,000 mark. Plenty of inspiration from toe but more rough and less mathy. It’s making good listening while spending hours on facebook ads which is my current form of personal torment.
A thought…
Why aren’t there good punk rock musicals?
A quote…
When the best leader leads, the people say “we did it ourselves“ -Lao-tzu
Thanks for reading,
//// Josh