Top Secret #11: Deep Space, Dumb Features, and the Drudgery of "Enterprise Readiness"
This week, we talk about moonshots, SCIM-induced ennui, encryption via chaos theory, the extinction of Neanderthals, and why AI thinks 'vegetative electron microscopy' is real.
I stopped by YC last week to catch Launch Live. If you’re not familiar, Garry started hosting these Friday afternoon events for startups to show off demos to other YC founders. It’s mostly for folks in the current batch, but a bunch of alumni will roll through and see what people are working on.
It was great to catch up with a bunch of people. A few unrelated reflections from me:
Wow. Some of these startups are ambitious. Something has changed. I figure the successes of SpaceX and OpenAI have given people a little more enthusiasm for moonshot projects. I couldn’t believe some of the projects people are taking on. I spent a while talking about deep space Lagrange points with someone building some pretty radical aerospace infrastructure. We’re long past the days of Uber for Dogs.
MCP everything. Yeah, there’s still a ton of B2B software. Just as a year ago, nearly all of it is AI-first. The difference is that people are building on the Model Context Protocol. I had developed an intuition that MCP was a bit overhyped, but now I’m not sure. It really does seem powerful. We’re still sort of in MCP’s prototype era, but you can do some pretty innovative stuff with it.
‘Enterprise readiness’ falls flat. I’ve been workshopping our messaging a little bit before our public launch, and Launch Live was a great test. It’s pretty clear to me that we haven’t nailed it yet. For people who haven’t built enterprise software before, it’s not really obvious that enterprises will want a bunch of tedious features like SCIM. I think we need to do a better job of illustrating how different enterprise software is from prosumer-y tools.
For any YC alums on this mailing list, I highly recommend making the effort to attend a Launch Live. They’re really worth attending.
What We’re Reading
Sunscreen, Clothing and Caves May Have Given Modern Humans an Edge Over Neanderthals When Earth’s Magnetic Field Wandered: Neanderthals went extinct soon after an unusual inversion of Earth’s magnetic poles. It appears that such a magnetic change would effect a meaningful increase in UV radiation. The researchers here observe that Homo sapiens changed behavior, spending more time sheltered and using more ochre (a form of sunblock), while Neanderthals … just didn’t.
Man Group Q2 2025 Credit Outlook: the news tends to focus on equities. This is a nice summary of happenings in the credit market. You can scroll through and read each Man Group team’s perspective. For example, there’s a note on the surprising resilience of emerging market corporate credit – would not have expected that in light of recent tariffs.
Beware of this sneaky Google phishing scam: man, phishing has gotten so much better. It’d be so easy to fall for this one. All the more reason to rely on passkeys!
A Scanning Error Created a Fake Science Term—Now AI Won’t Let It Die: ok, this one is fascinating. AI can’t stop spreading vegetative electron microscopy around the internet. It’s a nonsense term that came out of a minor formatting issue. It means nothing. But now it’s seemingly impossible to get rid of. Kind of like crypto. Apparently these kinds of things (the terms) are called “digital fossils.” Kind of like NFTs.
White House plagued by Signal controversy as Pentagon in “full-blown meltdown”: apparently it’s not good to text your brother about confidential military operations. Who would have guessed?
Nerd CornerTM
Authentication software like ours relies on modern cryptography. We make certain well-defined transformations on data such that we can either guarantee its confidentiality or authenticity. Those transformations almost always rely on certain one way functions. That is, we have some function that’s really easy to compute in one direction and really quite hard to reverse.
We have a few (presumptive) one-way functions that we use frequently in modern software. For example, we often assume that it’s infeasible to compute the discrete logarithm of an elliptic curve over a finite field. It’s very easy to calculate modular exponentiation on such an elliptic curve, but no one really knows how to efficiently reverse that operation. (You need a bit of background in algebra for this to make any sense – this stuff is supremely technical.)
Practically speaking, if you can find a suitable one-way function, you might expect to devise a novel cryptographic scheme. Chaotic dynamical systems are a pretty natural starting point if you’re looking for one-way functions. Since they’re pretty much defined in terms of what you do next, it’s not very hard to iteratively march forward through time in a dynamical system. But for certain dynamical systems, it’s (probably) impossible to work backwards. Those characteristics result in a pretty good one-way function.
For reasons that elude me a bit, relatively few people seem interested in advancing the theoretical study of chaotic cryptosystems. But I did stumble across a really interesting paper on the topic last year, in which a PhD candidate at the University of Chicago came up with what seems like a good one-way function.
I’d be really curious to see if people invest more effort in chaos-based cryptosystems. I can’t speculate honestly on whether there are any good practical reasons for researchers to investigate chaos-based cryptosystems, but it’s at least interesting!
Other Cool Stuff
Townscaper: nothing too crazy here. This is just a really satisfying web-based game. All you do is click to build a neat little town. It’s kind of meditative. If you want to waste 15 minutes, this is a great way to do it.
Early photography of Japan: if you’re into history, you might find this neat. This is a Smithsonian collection of photos from the late 19th century in Japan. It’s kind of surreal. For example, it’s hard to believe that this is Tokyo. The collection really highlights the vertiginous pace of industrialization that Japan underwent in subsequent decades.
From The Archives
(1995): The Internet Tidal Wave
(2001): Do Hedge Funds Hedge?
(2007): ‘Fake Steve’ Blogger Comes Clean
(2019): Having Kids
(2021): Digital Attack Map
Thanks,
Ned