Top Secret #21: Cookies, The Tesseral Vault, Kelp, and Cicero's Secretary
This week, we talk about our July cookies promotion (sign up, log in a user, and I will personally bake you cookies, despite never having baked before), improvements to the Tesseral Vault, and more.
Alright, folks, we have a rare promotion running. For anyone who both (a) signs up for Tesseral and (b) successfully signs in a new user before the end of July, I will personally bake you cookies. To be clear, I do not know how to bake. I cannot recall ever having made cookies. This will be an adventure for us all.
I really do mean this, by the way.
In other news, we’ve been hard at work polishing up the user experience in Tesseral. Over the last week, Blake reworked our Vault UI (i.e., the settings pages that face end users). Things look dramatically more polished. Things are a lot easier to use.
In parallel, we’ve been making some quiet but substantial improvements to our infrastructure. These changes will manifest in two important outcomes for our customers: first, the cloud service will get even faster; second, self-hosting will get simpler.
We also have some major new features landing soon! Stay tuned!
From The Blog
Auth for B2B SaaS: it's not like auth for consumer software: a lot of people have asked us what makes B2B auth so different. Here’s an answer! This one was up on the front page of Hacker News all day yesterday. It drove a bunch of good conversation and inbound customer interest.
What We’re Reading
Killer whales groom each other—with pieces of kelp: so researchers have long known that marine mammals can build and use tools. This marks the first known instance of such marine mammals using tools cooperatively. Pretty cool!
When a Lumberjack’s Imagination Ran Wild, He Created More Than 200 Sculptures in Wisconsin’s Northwoods: what a cool portrait of small-scale folk art and the people committed to its maintenance.
Bewildering surge in Regencell stock: so there’s this tiny (and I mean tiny) Chinese company that makes dubious herbal treatments for ADHD. It loses a few million dollars a year. It has announced no news. For seemingly no reason, the stock has rocketed up to a puzzling valuation. At one point, it had been up 82,000% YTD, reaching a market cap in the 10s of billions of dollars. That efficient market hypothesis doesn’t look too good right now.
Oklo moves closer to nuclear power deal with US Air Force: so it looks like this company that builds micro nuclear reactors is making good progress in selling to the Department of Defense. There are still hurdles to clear, but things look good. The stock is soaring. Things look good for deep tech!
Mexican drug cartel hacker spied on FBI official’s phone to track and kill informants, report says: I wish there were more details on how the attacker pulled this off…
Bowling for Nobels–How a centuries-old math puzzle helped us see inside the human brain: a fascinating article about the intersection of math and medicine.
Nerd CornerTM
For a long time, there wasn’t a good shorthand for Latin. Cicero wanted to change that. He tasked his secretary Tiro with inventing a suitable shorthand.
Tiro invented a convoluted system with thousands of individual signs that could be used in complex composite structures. The system became highly popular and remained in extensive use throughout the medieval period. It’s honestly pretty crazy. Here’s what it looks like:
Some Tironian signs even made it into Unicode! For example, check out U+204A. Pretty cool!
Other Cool Stuff
Here are some neat links for you.
From The Archives
(2009): Ask YC: has the economy changed the going rate for programmers?
(2011): Wikileaks is running out of cash
(2014): Why Bitcoin matters
(2014): Why Silicon Valley Works
Thanks,
Ned