Another really interesting week, where I took part in a YouTuber's video shoot, where I got hypnotized, and I'll come back on that experience.
On the work side, I keep moving forward little by little on certain projects, while still thinking about what really drives me.
Setting goals
It's been a few weeks now that I haven't really done bug bounty. I know I have phases like this where I don't necessarily have the motivation to do it, and that's ok in my opinion.
I know I'll find that motivation back from time to time and I'll spend quite a bit of time on it. I feel like the AI hype is slowly going down, while still being widely used. Or maybe it's just because I've stepped away from it all.
I still hear from people around me that there's just as much AI slop, that triage times are dragging on and there are still quite a few problems, which doesn't really make me want to go back, but it's part of the game.
I still wanted to talk about a concept I really like and that helps me work in bug bounty: setting impact goals, not necessarily monetary ones.
Because I find it hard to tell yourself "I want to make $10k this month in bug bounty" knowing it's out of your control, between triage times, payment delays, etc.
Instead, find fun goals in terms of impact like:
- I want to do Account Takeover on every account on this specific site
- I'd love to manage to access the camera permissions of users on Zoom
- I want to break their PDF generator
Goals that give meaning to what we do. And it also helps give clear instructions to agents to help us accomplish our task. Whereas if you just tell yourself "I want to find bugs, or criticals on this program", it's too vague for the brain.
And setting goals that are hard enough but not too easy either, to get into the flow and really enjoy the moment, that's what really makes you want to go.
Learning
Learning has never been this easy since we got LLMs. We have an unlimited knowledge base, very easy to use, that can do research and help us.
But on the other side, it makes us lazy and we don't do the research ourselves anymore, so it's a double-edged sword.
If we take the example of Hacking, we could all learn a ton by giving the LLM all the tools and research articles and having it build specific labs and exercises to train ourselves, and we'd be way better mentally.
But instead, we go straight to telling it to find bugs for us instead of training us, and I'm the first to do that. Humans want the fastest path to dopamine, and here dopamine being finding vulnerabilities and getting paid, might as well do it directly.
On the other hand, on other topics, I keep learning a lot, and for that, instead of fully making the AI do the work for me, I ask it to find me the best resources on a topic, whether it's podcasts, books or articles, and I take the time to read them. And for the boring or difficult parts, I ask it to help me.
It lets you sweep through certain topics much more easily than before, and that's not bad.
Self-hypnosis
Last week, I took part in the shoot of a YouTube video by a creator I really like. And he invited a hypnotist, because he wanted to do an experiment, and he offered a few subscribers to come, and I went.
About hypnosis, I had already tried some self-hypnosis when I was younger and I find the concept fascinating, but I had never been hypnotized myself. And I was pretty curious because you see a lot of shows where people get hypnotized in a few seconds and do all kinds of crazy things.
And that day, it was my turn. At first, it didn't really work, I think I wasn't into it, and my contradictory mind wasn't really willing. Then I let myself be carried, and he managed to hypnotize me.
It was both incredible and impressive. I was completely conscious of everything happening but I was under hypnosis. For example, he made me call myself Robert and all the other people were Bob.
And when he asked me for the others' first names, I answered Bob instinctively, while being conscious. I knew it wasn't Bob, but my mind made me say Bob.
It was really impressive. He also made me forget the number 7, and when doing calculations, it gave nonsense results. It's crazy how much you can play on the human mind and the subconscious.
This experience brought me back to self-hypnosis and meditation, and I'm digging even deeper into the subject, because it interests me a lot. And it can help with performance, whether in sport or at work.
Can't wait to see all this come together, and we'll see all that next week!
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