A few months ago, we launched SSOReady and received more interest than we were really prepared for. It’s been a bit of a challenge to keep our friends and customers up-to-date on what we’re doing, from new product updates to interesting articles. With that in mind, we’ve decided to launch a newsletter. We’re calling it Top Secret.
In Top Secret, you can expect us to share random points of view on anything that has caught our interest. Remember Ulysse’s timezones blog post? We’ll be distributing a bunch of stuff like that. And we’ll be sharing what we’re reading – the sources of our esoteric trivia.
Now, we do have to make sure that this newsletter is useful to our business. Otherwise, our investors will get cranky. So we’ll be sharing little tidbits about new product launches, events, and other sorts of business news.
We hope you enjoy it!
What We’re Reading
Mapping the effectiveness and risks of GLP-1 receptor Agonists: GLP-1s like Ozempic and Wegovy have won widespread attention for their effectiveness in treating obesity. Research increasingly indicates that GLP-1s also treat a range of maladies from infections to schizophrenia to Alzheimer’s disease. This research studies an immense Veterans Affairs dataset to gauge GLP-1s’ effects on a broad range of health outcomes.
Elliott Management’s letter to Honeywell: huge multi-national conglomerate Honeywell has had a dismal few years, at least in terms of its stock price. Activist hedge fund Elliott Management lays out in this letter its argument for Honeywell to break up into a few smaller, simpler businesses. It’s an interesting glimpse into the way Wall Street looks at huge, mature companies.
Stick with us: for some reason, there’s an emergent movement on the internet for people who really like cool sticks. No, really, sticks. I didn’t know about this.
The young engineers behind DOGE: supporting Elon Musk in running the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) are a small number of very young men with significant technical prowess. Politics aside, this is an interesting phenomenon.
Top Secret Developer Tips
In the future, we may do a version of this that’s useful. But here’s one I really like. You can play the entirety of Star Wars: A New Hope in your terminal in ASCII art.
$ brew install telnet
$ telnet towel.blinkenlights.nlNerd CornerTM
Rat populations are booming because of our warming climate, urban sprawl, and shifting waste patterns, which have made the rodents more resilient and aggressive scavengers. Gentrification and construction, too, have pushed rats into new neighborhoods, driving record-high 311 complaints in cities like NYC and DC. As a Georgetown graduate, I am well-acquainted with Washingtonian rats and can speak to their tenacity.
Other Cool Stuff
Underleaf: in college, I spent way too much time typing up problem sets for math courses – like four or five hours a week. I’ve been waiting for someone to build a text to LaTeX AI tool. Underleaf seems to be exactly that.
Mixbox: it turns out that current painting software doesn’t work like real paint. A couple smart people in Prague wrote up a cool paper outlining a totally new way of building painting software that really mixes like actual paint.
From The Archives
(2007) “PDF”
(2010) We use BobX
(2012) Inside Stripe, the PayPal competitor backed by PayPal founders
(2014) How I was able to track the location of any Tinder user
(2015) The case for email security
That’s all for now! Be sure to subscribe to Top Secret to get updates directly in your inbox.
Thanks,
Ned