The Insider Weekly #4 - AI Everywhere | 5 Pentests in 2023 | One Meal A Day
During a domestic flight last night, which lasted about an hour, I kept thinking about what I was going to tell you in today’s email. Initially, I thought I’ve got nothing to say. But as I reviewed my past week, a lot of things popped up into my mind and I started putting them down in my Notion.
First off, AI seems to be everywhere, and it’s only getting better. I’m using AI in Notion to help me with everything, from summarizing to writing things better to getting more ideas, and so much more.
I’m using AI in research by helping me go through scientific papers. I’m using Elicit for this purpose. Semantic Scholar is also good, but not as advanced. Biomed Explorer from Google is another one. And there are so many others products and services that pop up each day that goes by.
I’m using AI when coding, with Copilot and OpenAI Codex. And I know repl.it has its own spin on AI pair programming.
Last but not least, I’ve been using OpenAI’s GPT3(.5) and ChatGPT extensively in all my endeavors: creative, learning/studying, and business-related.
Millions of other people rely heavily on this technology. This makes me want to deepen my studies and practice of AI so that I can learn its inner workings for building (creating with AI) and debugging purposes.
Many people are new to AI and machine learning and don’t know much beyond the very surface-level stuff.
I remember I started learning and playing with machine learning algorithms circa 2015-2016 (I’ve also published 3 AI-related courses). That’s probably the main reason I feel the ongoing urge to do more work in this field. Right now, my work in cybersecurity and my creative projects take up the majority of my time. But there’s no excuse, it’s all about priorities. And I’ll be sizing up the chunk of my time devoted to AI and machine learning very soon.
I think that going deep with machine learning and AI is a safe bet to bulletproof your future career and not only, because whatever the field you’re currently mostly operating in (myself: cybersecurity), sooner or later, AI is going to have a strong stand in that field.
We’re in the second week of 2023 and I’m still struggling with waking up early. My target is 7:30 and I’m currently waking up around 8:45. I know how to fix this:
going to sleep earlier (currently around 00:30).
planning specific tasks that need to be done before 9 AM, such as creative stuff and studying.
On a different note, I’m happy that I’ve been consistent with my cycling routine and strength training via calisthenics. I’ve been riding my bike every day this past week, even on the days it rained.
I’m also satisfied with the fact that I kept a one-meal-a-day routine, which helps me tremendously with focus, mental clarity, productivity, and high energy levels.
When it comes to reading books, I’ve got 23 books in my “Currently Reading” folder on my Kindle, the most notable additions being: Think Again by Adam Grant, What’s In It for Them by Joe Polish and Never Finished by David Goggins (this is in audiobook format).
When it comes to work and cybersecurity projects, I’ve already clocked 5 pentests and appsec projects in 2023. And in the past week, I received a few interesting opportunities for future work in cybersecurity, creative/promotions, and consultations with clients through my email, Twitter, and LinkedIn. I keep reminding myself that all of these unconventional channels (for growth and business) are extremely important and can become very lucrative, especially when you least expect them.
One of the ways to engage one-on-one with me is via the paid version of this newsletter. As a subscriber, you can send me quick questions via Twitter, and be sure you’ll receive a reply from me. I’m not gonna talk much about this because, given the multitude of projects I’m currently involved in, I’ve got quite a limited bandwidth.
If you really insist on knowing about last weekend’s productivity marathon, it was a success!
Now, some noteworthy events and links from the past week:
The Most Frequent Vulnerabilities I Found in 80+ Pentests in 2022 - (by yours truly)
AI Straight in Your Terminal - a tool I developed; to use GPT3 in your terminal
Must-have checklists I use in my pentesting assessments - (by yours truly)
The Week in Security: When AI attacks, ChatGPT lowers the bar for developing malware
Elicit - The AI Research Assistant (free AI tool - very powerful - many features)
Reply to this email if you want to tell/ask me something. That said, I’ll see you in batch #5.