D-Squared Musings – Week 51
Tech
🧑💻 You probably won’t survive 2024… Top 10 Tech Trends
- Fireship is hilarious. I look forward to this video each year due to his outlandish predictions. My favorite of this year would be the rapid increase in quality text-to-video GenAI models.
🤖 Indirect Prompt Injections in the Wild – Real World exploits and mitigations Johann Rehberger
- Johann did a great job explaining the different forms of direct and indirect prompt injection through practical examples. Examples always help me grok something new.
♊ Gemini Full Breakdown + AlphaCode 2 Bombshell
- AI Explained provided the most level-headed review of Google’s new Gemini announcement. There’s a lot of hype around this model being superior to GPT-4, which is likely true in some cases, but if you dig into the paper you’ll see that the gap isn’t as wide as Google made it out to be.
🛡️Purple Llama: Towards open trust and safety in the new world of generative AI
- It’s exciting to see Meta (and others) progressing toward LLM evaluators that can accurately and reliably detect vulnerable code and malicious intent from other LLMs. This is important for defenders.
Education
🏠 Why buying a house in the US is so hard right now
- I often feel like the black sheep when talking to people about home ownership. Common knowledge states that home ownership is an investment and something we should all aspire for, but if you take a step back and assess alternative forms of investment, the returns are below average. I understand buying a home can be emotional for some, but if you’re going into debt for 20+ years, consider setting those emotions aside for big life decisions.
- There’s something about this video that spoke to me this past week. I think it’s the point around “willing happiness into existence”, taking it as a burden we all carry and should take more seriously.
🚗 Tour of Tesla Billions $ Factory Producing Most Advanced Electric Cars
- It’s amazing to see just how much of the Tesla factory is already automated. If I had to guess, likely ~70% of the tasks are completed by robots. I assumed the number was high for them, but seeing it in action makes it real
Miscellaneous
🚀 Starship | Second Flight Test
- Here’s a hype video SpaceX pulled together for the second launch of Starship.
🎤 From High School Dropout To $952 Million At 33
- Interesting insight into how billionaires think and behave. Specifically, around taxes and all the tricks the wealthy leverage to avoid losing and possibly making money via taxes.