sethhochberg

Generally yes - a compromised CA can be used to issue certificates for any domain, which is why when a CA is compromised the first step is usually for browser vendors, OS vendors, etc to immediately remove the compromised CA from their trust lists.

This is the compromise. In exchange for having the ability to easily establish an encrypted connection to pretty much any public web service, the tradeoff is that the entire public internet's encryption is only as good as the operations of the weakest of the big public certificate authorities.

The real problem the CAs try to solve is, basically, being a trusted middleman who vouches for other certificates.

The first time you connect to google.com in your browser and get the google.com certificate, your web browser has to decide whether or not to trust that cert. It would be very complicated if every website on the internet had to prove its identity via some sort of out of band process, so web browsers, operating systems, etc all ship with a collection of trusted, institutionally-important certificates which are allowed to vouch for other certificates that aren't yet known to the browser, OS, etc.

Your browser (or whatever HTTPS client) basically says "I've never seen this certificate before, but Lets Encrypt (or Digicert or whoever) says they trust it and we trust Lets Encrypt, so we can treat it as trusted". You as a user are trusting that whatever verification/validation process the CA does is at least good enough to ensure that the owner of the domain is the entity giving you a certificate for that domain.

This is obviously not a perfect system. These CAs can be compromised and break the trust, and they have various levels of validation of the people and companies who come to them and ask to be included in their vouching network, etc. But its a compromise to make sure that users can connect to a wide variety of internet sites, using encryption, without needing to somehow decide whether they themselves trust the certificate provided by the website.

The most important thing to remember is that in most cases the CA is not vouching for the quality or integrity of the website - they are just vouching for whether the person/group who controls the domain/server is also the person/group providing the certificate for encrypted communication with the website. Its a protection against MITM attacks and snooping, not a protection against phishing or anything else that might happen once the connection is established.

The key difference is that while an encyclopedia holds facts themselves, LLMs trained on that source material encode something more like a highly probable facsimile of those facts - the original fact was lost, LLMs are lossy, but can often be generated again with a decent level of accuracy by churning through stats about words, concepts, and relationships between them.

The whole catch is that they can often be regenerated. But LLMs (on their own, in their parametric memory - which is the result of training) don't have any conception of whether what they've generated is a real reproduction of some training material or whether they've invented something false that seemed probable based on their encoded stats. When the probability produces something contrary to what was in the training material, you get hallucinations.

They're very, very good predictive text models and can be very, very powerful when hooked up to other tools or outside databases. But its fundamentally lossy technology and all the books having been fed in doesn't guarantee all of the knowledge from those books can be spat back out.

People tend to mix the terms around a lot, but generally you'll see the manufacturers use "ducted split system" or "mini split", where mini splits are the self-contained wall or ceiling mounted units.

I live in an NYC apartment with a similar Mitsubishi ducted split system - very short run ductwork just because the apartment itself is small, but takes up way less space than traditional American-style air handlers, even the apartment sized ones. The entire air handler is suspended above my bathroom ceiling, in between the drywall and the slab above.

My system was originally installed with the 2-wire serial wall thermostat but I converted it to one of Mitsubishi's Redlink wireless units because I needed to relocate the thermostat. But since Redlink isn't wifi, and the Mitsubishi networked thermostats and cloud platform get pretty poor reviews... this project is super interesting to me.

I think there's an element of this which really breaks down to the type system being the part of formal verification that we've figured out how to do during the course of implementation.

Software engineers (myself included, over the years) often argue their real value isn't just writing code, its figuring out the gaps in requirements and how to resolve them. Sometimes that engineering process gets turned back into a formal spec. But much more often, the implementation functionally becomes the spec and contains many details that were never present in the original statement of the requirements.

Formal verification techniques in general are a harder sell until we get the industry to a point where there's broader agreement that what we call "implementation" is often a blurry mix of spec development, prototyping, and actual implementation all happening at the same time.

The details people gloss over when throwing SOC 2 or whatever other audit costs around are the complexity of the system being audited, the chosen criteria to audit (AICPA defines 5 families of criteria... Security is one, but you can optionally add Processing Integrity, Confidentiality, etc etc) and the reputation of the auditor.

A security-only audit for a small company with a narrow product focus can indeed be very inexpensive. A full SOC 2 examination for a large organization with a mix of legacy and modern systems by a name-recognizable public accounting firm can be many hundreds of thousands of dollars, or more if you need a Big 4 firm.

In my opinion, there's not much value to the "cheap" audits... If you're doing enterprise sales to a certain kind of client, your partners who demand an audit are going to want a reputable auditor or they're just going to put you through their own in-depth procurement due diligence regardless. The segment of the industry where a SOC 2 attestation is mandatory to participate but where any random auditor will do feels pretty narrow.

The real takeaway for projects and companies should be that someone having historically behaved in a logical and responsible way doesn’t guarantee that they’ll continue to do that for forever.

Good security architecture has circuit breakers, even for people who are generally high-trust.

I’m one of those people. Wore watches regularly through my mid 20s, completely fell out of the habit as I spent more years working from home and my routine around “getting ready for the day” loosened, and the Apple Watch was the thing that got me to put something on my wrist again - until I got sick of the screen and kept wearing watches, but now analogue ones.

The concept of "tool building" is one of the areas my team has spent the most time coaching our less-technical employees on since widespread LLM rollout in our company.

Developers and developer-adjacent, technical people tend to think this way on their own... but every business has dark corners where repetitive, manual things still happen. We're leaning a lot on training and even org-wide LLM instructions to try and let the LLM (by its own assessment) be the vehicle use to codify a process and turn it into some good old-fashioned reviewable, deterministic automation.

Honestly whipping up a lexer/parser and a REPL is one of my favorite ways to learn a new language. You can cover a lot of ground in a "real" language by just doing the frontend implementation of your own made-up language grammar and a little eval loop and its great for learning/teaching because you don't get bogged down in trying to solve some actual problem.

Which is to say: no shame in just settling for that simple C backend!

Whats implied there is that the "human touch" will become a luxury.

I have a hard time seeing a future where retail doesn't bifurcate even further into ultra low margin, happy-path optimized megastores and concierge-style high touch boutiques. Places like Crutchfield that split the difference nicely seem to be a dying breed.

Even in a relatively open organization where conversations and work are public/discoverable by default, there's still a huuuge difference between the level of curiosity required to join a convo happening in the office kitchen while you're waiting for a coffee to brew vs needing to spend your idle time at work discovering places (Slack channels or whatever else) to chime in while hoping you're not a distraction for others.

I'm a pretty staunch defender of remote work for most roles, but outside of the smallest companies where the entire organization is on a single conversational thread, you really do lose the organic peripheral vision that comes with an office environment and deliberate effort is required to try and recreate some of that in your fully-remote org if you want some of the same upside. Even with deliberate effort, I'm not convinced you can match it perfectly.

Corporate software in general is often chosen based on the value returned simply being "good enough" most of the time, because the actual product being purchased is good controls for security, compliance, etc.

A corporate purchaser is buying hundreds to thousands of Claude seats and doesn't care very much about percieved fluctuations in the model performance from release to release, they're invested in ties into their SSO and SIEM and every other internal system and have trained their employees and there's substantial cost to switching even in a rapidly moving industry.

Consumer end-users are much less loyal, by comparison.