#064: Your Future Self Is Watching You, How Much Plastic is in Your Food, Audit Your Browser Extensions

Hi All, and Happy New Year!

We are pleased to welcome you to this week's edition of Undiscovered, a newsletter with exclusive resources and insights expanding from the material found on our main site - becketu.com.

This week, we will take a look at a website that compiles all the data on plastics found in Bay Area food, why you should audit your browser extensions, a useful mind visualization to help you during the new year, and more.

Let's dive in:

Large Language Models Visualized

What better way to start the New Year than with a lil' Large Language Model visualization? This impressive site from software engineer Brendan Bycroft displays visualizations and explanations for models GPT-2, nano-gpt, and GPT-3.

It's set up like a book, with a Table of Contents that explains a broad introduction and preliminaries. From there it goes deeper into exploring components such as Embedding, Layer Norm, Self Attention, Projection, MLP, Transformer, Softmax, and Output.

What I love about the site is how well its designed. The "chapters" of the book are extremely short, and when you want to focus on a component, the diagram highlights the section and allows automatic scrolling while reading. It's a great refresher on LLMs, and an example of thoughtful web design for education.

How Much Plastic is in Your Food

Nat Friedman is the CEO of GitHub, former chairman of the GNOME Foundation, active board member at the Arc Institute, and an advisor of Midjourney. He also just released what may be the most eye-opening site of late 2024: Plasticlist.org.

Essentially, Plasticlist contains all the data on plastic chemicals found in Bay Area foods. It can be a little scary at first, and when you open the site, it even provides a disclaimer stating not to draw high-confidence conclusions from the small sample size of research taken. What I love about it, is how the button to close the disclaimer says "Got it, I promise not to freak out".

Alas, it's hard to put the genie back in the bottle, especially when you find out the plastic content in an In-n-Out Animal Style Cheeseburger. Nat continued to share his top 5 findings from the test results, along with a full 20-page report on key takeaways. If you'd like to contribute to the research, Nat even provided instructions on how to run your own tests to measure plastics in foods.

Patrick Collison Reflects on Reading the Classics

Patrick Collison is the Co-Founder and CEO of Stripe, and one of the more interesting figures in the tech world. He has provided advice to those aged 10-20 on his blog, and most recently shared how he read ten important historical novels during 2024.

They include: Jane Eyre, Middlemarch, To The Lighthouse, Bleak House, Portrait of a Lady, Anna Kerenina, Life and Fate, Heart of Darkness, Madame Bovary, and The Magic Mountain.

He shared his reflections after reading them, and I found it to be quite fascinating. He discussed which were his favorites, and how we can understand history and what life was like at the time of these novels, simply by observing how they were written.

Collison described Middlemarch as the one book he would enthusiastically reread, and I found it especially compelling after the following quip:

For me the clear standouts are Middlemarch, Bleak House, Karenina, and Life and Fate. I would enthusiastically reread any of them. If I had to choose just one to go to again, I would probably select Middlemarch. There's something memorably compelling in Eliot's affection and empathy for almost all of her characters. If Succession is a show with no likable personalities, Middlemarch is the opposite

His entire breakdown is long, but well worth the read - especially if you are drawn to add a 'classic' to your reading list this year.

Practical Guide to Get Hired in Tech

Hiring tendencies in tech have been a hot topic lately, so we're glad to see how Apoorva Govind shared her experiences being involved in hiring panels at companies like Apple & Uber.

This is one of the most comprehensive and thoughtful takes on the situation, delicately outlining and responding to the question, "why is your talented American kid not getting a job after their CS degree?"

The article discusses the entire process in depth, looking at common myths, and responding to each point of contention.

As an added help, she even outlines the main points to work on when trying to land a job, including: build side projects, practice LeetCode, Get Internships, Network & Hustle, Go where the jobs are, and Apply to startups.

She expands on each of these points in the article, but it remains one of the more practical write ups I have seen. Hopefully, this advice continues to be shared and puts the hiring process in perspective for all those involved.

Why You Should Audit Your Browser Extensions

11 days ago, MegaLag released a video titled "Exposing the Honey Influencer Scam". This quickly racked up 14 million views on YouTube and became headline news all over the internet. The public outcry became so loud, it even spurred Marques Brownlee to respond with his own video explaining the situation.

It's easy to look at Honey as the only culprit behind nefarious browser extension operations. But @wono_strategy on Twitter describes how this goes beyond just the Honey scandal.

He describes what browser extensions can theoretically do, their read and write permissions, and how it opens the door to financial fraud, identity theft, and more.

Wono notes that "they don't necessarily have to be malicious to be dangerous" and how it could just come down to one malicious employee, a hack, or getting sold to shady company in the future.

Wono walks us through practical steps for protecting ourselves, with the two following statements being the most relevant:

1) Review every extension and ask your yourself: Do I really need it?

2) If the answer is no, remove it. If the answer is yes check the permissions ("Details" button). If you see 'Read and change all your data on all websites' under Permissions, this is a huge red flag.

More tips can again be found in the thread here, so be sure to check this out when possible.

BONUS: Your Future Self is Watching You

To start the new year, we have a bonus entry, an excerpt from @Argon_delta, explaining an interesting concept of your future self watching and supporting your current self:

imagine how your current self teleports back to 1 year ago when you were in the trenches, unsure, anxious and holding tightly to your faith while the currents of life were violently moving.

imagine you meet that person face to face. give him encouragement. tell him it's all going to be fine cuz u got dawg in u. feel proud of him and how brave he is.

Now.

Literally the same thing is happening right now,

but

Your future self is watching YOU.

And thanking you.

Because the action you're taking right now got him to where he is.

Let's have a great year, everyone!

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Always wishing you the best,

J.B.

Becket U

Undiscovered #064: Your Future Self Is Watching You, How Much Plastic is in Your Food, Audit Your Browser Extensions