For those who use Next.js, please check whether you’re exposed to this CVE. There was an awful lot of noise over the last few days about this – most of which I feel no need to comment on. Just please confirm that you’re in good shape.
For us, there’s been a lot of exciting work underway. We’re quietly shipping lots of products, including some subtle quality of life features. We’ve been thinking an awful lot about gnarly, weird quirks of web browsers. We’re testing out a pretty unique (and, we think, fairly clever) authentication technique based on the design of OAuth.
We’ve also been having some fun goofing off and making dumb videos:
Also, if you’re in the YC Open Source community, drop me a note! We should find time to catch up on Friday.
What We’re Reading
The End of the Genetic Paradigm of Cancer: the title here is a little bit grandiose for a general audience, but it’s provocative. The authors of this piece argue against the prevailing conceptual model many of us hold for cancer – what’s called the somatic mutation theory (SMT). Researchers have invested a great deal in the general supposition that specific ‘driver mutations’ give rise to cancer. The authors of this piece urge a bit more modesty, arguing that the field’s recent fixation on specific genes has led it astray.
A Letter to the Shareholders of Autodesk: some of you know that I love letters from activist investors – I find them endlessly fascinating. In this letter, Starboard Value outlines a pretty elementary thesis. They recognize that Autodesk has a pretty strong market position; it’s a pretty strong suite of products that commands pretty solid prices. Starboard takes issue with Autodesk’s bloated operating expenses, essentially urging the company to lean out. They signal a pretty aggressive lack of faith in Autodesk management.
Harvard Launches New Intro Math Course to Address Pandemic Learning Loss: on one level, I’m glad that the university recognizes they have a problem. Simultaneously, though, this really bums me out. How are people so far behind as to need remedial math education in algebra – not ‘abstract algebra,’ but pre-calculus algebra.
Drones Will Do Some Schlepping for Sherpas on Mount Everest: imagine showing this to Sir Edmund Hillary. I appreciate that this improves on safety for sherpas, which should be lauded. All the same, it’s pretty disappointing to realize how commodified Everest climbs have become. What are we even doing?
Mouse-to-Mouse Resuscitation: Rodents Try to Revive Unconscious Buddies: this is cool. Seemingly, mice exhibit a sort of prosocial behavior in attempting to revive other mice. It has nothing to do with familiarity; they’ll do it for mice they’ve never encountered before. The researchers involved here seem to be the first to observe this behavior. What else have we not noticed?
A Math Couple Solves a Major Group Theory Problem—After 20 Years of Work: I expect that the mathematics involved here will elude most of us; I have a math degree and had to read it pretty slowly. Don’t get too bogged down in the details. This is mostly a stirring portrait of obsession.
Potatoes, Shrimp and Teslas: Exporters Vie to Shape Trump’s Tariffs: how thoroughly unsurprising that industry interest groups would rally to deter distortionary trade policy. From the article: “major business groups also continued to urge the administration to reduce trade barriers rather than raise them.” Hawley-Smoot was a catastrophic error – do we really need to do it again?
Top Secret Developer Tips
I don’t know how widely-known this is, but I recently learned that you can do text-to-speech from the command line. You just have to use say.
It works like this (on Mac):
$ say "obey me, tiny human"I’m not sure how you’d ever make this useful, but turning this into a script does open up a wide world of potential pranks. It kind of reminds me of that old prank where you could use VBA to open and close a CD drive.
Nerd CornerTM
Experimental physicists in the late 19th century uncovered some pretty remarkable stuff. For example, they discovered X-rays and electrons! This was around the time that scientists like Marie Curie were doing their best work.
In 1903, a French physicist called Prosper-René Blondlot published his discovery of N-rays, a new form of radiation. Other researchers scrambled to catch up, publishing hundreds of papers on N-rays and their properties. Some even proposed practical applications in medicine.
But N-rays didn’t exist.
From the American Physical Society:
Within months of Blondlot’s first announcement, many scientists–mostly French scientists, but a few others as well–would claim to have seen the rays… Blondlot and other N-ray believers argued that those who couldn’t see the rays simply didn’t have sufficiently sensitive eyes to detect the effects of N-rays, which were supposedly just at the limits of visibility.
N-rays turned out to be pretty easy to debunk. But it was still a pretty frothy year.
Other Cool Stuff
Suno: this is a really fun GenAI tool for generating music. The outputs are remarkably high quality, at least in the sense that they really feel like songs. But they also have a distinctly AI feel – they’re just kind of consistently mediocre. Even still, Suno’s a momentous technical achievement, and it’s really fun. I used it to make a song where the lyrics are just the SAML specification.
iPod.js: sticking on a similar theme, this is a web-based iPod emulator. You can OAuth into your Spotify or Apple music and use iPod.js to play your favorite songs. I had a lot of fun with this. I’ve gotten a bit frustrated with the Spotify web UI and have really enjoyed the nostalgia factor here. It makes me feel like it’s 2009 all over again.
From The Archives
(2014): YC Request for Startups
(2014): T-Mobile discovers no one wants a Blackberry any more
(2017) The low-code / no-code movement: more disruptive than you realize
Thanks,
Ned