We were incredibly surprised by the interest we received for this newsletter – thank you all for subscribing! I was not prepared for our wandering mess of trivia to have such broad appeal.
I’ll take the opportunity to reintroduce our company. We make software that helps developers implement auth. We released a product called SSOReady several months ago; it helps companies implement SAML single sign-on. Our customers range from major corporations with sophisticated security teams to scrappy startups that have never really heard of SAML.
We’ve been really pleased to receive positive feedback from customers using SSOReady. One customer wrote to us earlier this week:
We have been absolutely thrilled with the whole experience of working with the SSOReady software and team. I can confidently say that if we hadn't found you, it's very likely we would not even have continued to pursue SSO.
Due in large part to the success we’ve had with SSOReady – as well as our team’s hard work over the last few months – we have some really big news to share in a few weeks. I am having a hard time keeping a lid on it.
But keep an eye out!
What We’re Reading
Sailpoint S-1: enterprise identity provider Sailpoint has filed to go public a few years after Thoma Bravo scooped it up. Sailpoint’s doing $800M+ of ARR at a 30% YoY growth rate. The S-1 is broadly confirmatory of how much opportunity there really is in the identity business. There’s also a few really interesting things in here for my fellow nerds. For instance, it looks like Thoma absolutely nuked Sailpoint’s perpetual license business – have to imagine this was a part of their investment thesis.
Rotating locomotion in living systems: we use wheels for all kinds of stuff. Wheels are great. So why aren’t there animals with wheels? This is a surprisingly insightful article throughout, and there are a few interesting asides. For instance, biologists are aware of exactly one macroscopic free-rotating structure in animals: the glycoprotein rod (style) used for digestion in bivalves and gastropods. Weird!
Endpoints to deanonymize anyone who uses YouTube: this one was really hot on Hacker News, but it bears recycling here. I have little to add here except to applaud the author for their ingenuity. This bug is a really creative find.
Big cheeses spend big cheese on AI Super Bowl cheese ad, but have to remake it: Google made a commercial in which it claims that Gouda accounts for more than half of global cheese consumption. Or rather, Google’s AI tool Gemini made the claim. Even still, I’m kind of confused how this slipped through human review… At minimum, a claim like this should cause a raised eyebrow. Gouda grief!
The Westminster dog show was last week: congratulations to Monty the giant schnauzer who took home the top prize, “Best in Show.” We were interested to learn that giant schnauzers are particularly talented when it comes to nosework, the ability to detect scents and substances, and are often used as trackers for bombs, narcotics, and missing person cases.
Top Secret Developer Tips
This isn’t that useful, but it’s kind of neat. It turns out that Python lets you write an else for a for loop. I didn’t know about this. It runs when your for loop completes without hitting a break. You can read about it here. It kind of works like this:
numbers1 = [1, 2]
numbers2 = [3, 4]
def loop_over_numbers(numbers):
for number in numbers:
print(number)
if number == 4:
break
else:
print(“Hello!”)
loop_over_numbers(numbers1) # prints 1, 2, Hello!
loop_over_numbers(numbers2) # prints 3, 4Nerd CornerTM
If you ever watched The Big Short, you’ve probably run across the idea of asset-backed securities. Financiers will slice up a giant pool of loans into complicated instruments that other investors can buy. Most commonly, we do this with mortgages. Among other things, there are just a lot of dollars tied up in mortgages.
But we actually do the same thing with other kinds of debt. It’s a much smaller market than mortgages, but you can buy exotic asset-backed securities associated with credit cards, student loans, leases for shipping containers, and more.
Credit agency Fitch tracks indices for a bunch of these securities. One drew my eye the other day: the US Heavy Metal (AG/CE/TR) Equipment ABS Delinquency Index. It essentially tracks the rate at which agriculture, construction, and transportation firms are failing to pay their loans. The index has been climbing pretty aggressively over the last year.
I’m not sure I know exactly what’s driving that (interest rates? slump in aggregate demand?). Not many people seem to be talking about it, but this seems like a clear indicator of distress in the industrial sector.
Other Cool Stuff
Pinch: A new YC W25 company that just launched, Pinch makes AI tools that automatically translate your video calls. We tested it out this week. There’s a tiny bit of latency – as you would expect – but the translations are pretty damn good. We’re impressed.
The Divergent Association Task: Our team’s highest score was in the 99th percentile. We also tried to get as low a score as possible, with Ulysse, our CTO, comfortably in the lead. He realized that the app doesn’t check whether you actually use nouns and instead used words like a, an, the, is, etc. – well played.
/r/keebgirlies: There is a subreddit now for women and non-binary people who really like mechanical keyboards, and it has several thousand subscribers. I am generally puzzled by the hobby of collecting mechanical keyboards, but I suppose I’m glad these people have made their own community.
From The Archives
(1998) Fighting Linkrot
(2001) Ballmer: Linux is a Cancer
(2008) The Rails Myths (DHH)
(2011) iPhone Hacker Publishes Secret Sony Playstation 3 Key
Thanks,
Ned