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This is an IT Support Group
​Weekly IT Roundup 🤠

Touch Eyeballs to Screen for Cheap Lasery Surgery

Computer, load up celery man please.

The acceleration of AI tech is moving quickly. It seems like week-after-week there is some new paper, technology or new feature dropped on the masses without warning.

The bizarre image above was generated by yours truly with Dall-E 3 after finding out Gumbo Slice was my new favorite meme and likely will be for a while.

I’ve been eagerly awaiting the release of ChatGPT vision, I think that’ll be another game-changer in the AI ecosystem.

This week’s column is about how I’m feeling after they activated the vax with the national alert — haha no, just kidding, it’s about AI taking your job.

Enjoy the newsletter!

-Stetson

Tech News TL;DR

This week’s IT and tech news in 5- minutes-ish or less

Cyber-Security

Hundreds of malicious Python packages found stealing sensitive data

Apple emergency update fixes new zero-day used to hack iPhones

Atlassian patches critical Confluence zero-day exploited in attacks

Researchers warn of 100,000 industrial control systems exposed online

Cisco fixes hard-coded root credentials in Emergency Responder

New 'Looney Tunables' Linux bug gives root on major distros

Microsoft now lets you play a game during Windows 11 installs

ShellTorch flaws expose AI servers to code execution attacks

Microsoft now lets you play a game during Windows 11 installs

ShellTorch flaws expose AI servers to code execution attacks

EvilProxy uses indeed.com open redirect for Microsoft 365 phishing

New BunnyLoader threat emerges as a feature-rich malware-as-a-service

Motel One discloses data breach following ransomware attack

Cloudflare DDoS protections ironically bypassed using Cloudflare

Artificial Intelligence

Facebook’s new AI stickers can generate Elmo with a knife

Deepfake celebrities begin shilling products on social media, causing alarm

Researchers show how easy it is to defeat AI watermarks

Dead grandma locket request tricks Bing Chat’s AI into solving security puzzle

AI language models can exceed PNG and FLAC in lossless compression, says

Jony Ive and OpenAI’s Altman reportedly collaborating on mysterious AI device

Spotify tests using AI to automatically clone and translate podcast voices

Can you melt eggs? Quora’s AI says “yes,” and Google is sharing the result

ChatGPT update enables its AI to “see, hear, and speak,” according to OpenAI

Misc

Return to Office Is Bullshit and Everyone Knows It

Exploiting the iPhone 4

Pixel 8 Pro

Some Pixel owners still can't dial 911 during an emergency

Detroit man steals 800 gallons using Bluetooth to hack gas pumps at station

I applied to 250 jobs and timed how long each one took

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Community Highlights 🚀

Discussions from This is an IT Support Group’s Facebook Group

There are two kinds of IT people. What are they?

Why do people CC themselves?

Do you swear at work?

If you get fired from a company and an employee asks you for a password that you know, would you give it to them?

Bummer, remote work for our org is slowly coming to an end.

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5 Minute Career Advice — is AI coming for my job? 🕑

Is AI going to take your job?

Absolutely not! Well, maybe not. No? Yes?

The answer is unclear to me and requires more thought.

I recently mentored someone who was anxious about pursuing a career in Software Development because “AI would be taking all of those jobs anyway”.

I think AI IS going to take a lot of jobs. There’s a company called Figure making robotic humanoids to replace warehouse workers. The founder claims that the company’s he talks to have high turnover and struggle to hire and fill roles.

Oddly, right now it almost seems “easier” to replace knowledge workers than it is to replace physical workers. I’ve heard multiple accounts of content writers being replaced with generative AI systems, so this change is already happening now, and it’s likely to accelerate.

My friend Edward Nevard wrote about AI and it’s impact on Cyber-Security roles. I agree with a lot of his points, AI does have narrow use-cases right now like detecting anomalies and recognizing patterns better than a human could.

“AI lacks the depth and breadth of human intelligence” - For now.

AI is getting better and better, and I think we’ll see AGI, or Artificial General Intelligence in our lifetimes.

What does this mean?

The nature of jobs is changing.

Google Sheets, Zoom and Slack didn’t “take our jobs” — they are tools for us to do our jobs more effectively. Ok, that might be a bit of a reach, but my point is: AI is a tool that will be commonplace in accomplishing modern job functions.

It already is for many of us. I use ChatGPT daily to explain difficult concepts, write code snippets and augment how I work.

The engineers and technicians that use AI are going to be even better at the jobs, and the ones who don’t lean in may get left behind.

During the Lex Fridman and Zuck metaverse interview, Zuck mentioned that we might have AI agents working on our team, even attending Zoom meetings. I could see that happening.

Still, I think we’re far away from AI being able to perform all of the functions of a modern engineer. Think of all the tangly pieces of infrastructure in an organization that require human hands to troubleshoot. Systems are complex and require design and on-going maintenance that I think is difficult for an AI to conquer.

Recently, I posted a job on Upwork — I got 10-15 proposals and 8-10 of them were almost the exact same, clearly written by AI.

In one case, the freelancer even suggested I use a Library that didn’t exist called Shellbuckets. F*cking shellbuckets! I’m still laughing about it.

In this case, a human touch is required and makes you stand out. Many such cases.

Should you make career decisions based on AI inevitably taking that job?

No, I don’t think so. Do your thing and realize the job might change in the future. And it might be weird.

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I wrote this newsletter while watching Idiocracy, which is now free to watch on YouTube. Awesome. It’s what plants crave.

See ya next week!

-Stetson

ITSG Founder