Recent content on efitz writings
I was just listening to this week’s (2026-05-21) All In Podcast. David Friedberg said something that I found very interesting. He said that many people are distrustful of tech companies because of a perceived imbalance in power- namely, that technology creates an opportunity for a very small number of people to exercise an outsized amount of power. I’m writing this to explore how…
I’m a computer security guy specializing in security architecture, cloud security, and application/product security. I’ve worked for 3 of the MAG7, and I’ve worked for all the major clouds except Azure (AWS, GCP, OCI). I’m coming up on 30 years in the security field. As hobbies, I write software and sometimes build hardware. I love smart home stuff; my goal is to have a…
A selection of my open-source projects on GitHub , grouped by topic. Almost everything is Apache 2.0 and/or MIT licensed. Agentic Coding skills — My AI-agent skills & plugins. TMI - Threat Modeling Improved - Threat modeling platform for humans and agents TMI Wiki tmi-ux — Web front-end for threat-model and data-flow-diagram editing, with OAuth/OIDC and real-time collaborative editing. tmi — REST…
Here’s a thing that has been bothering me lately. Frontier AI models are now performing at the 90th percentile or higher on a bunch of tasks that form the backbone of what white-collar workers do: reading comprehension, coding, legal research, medical diagnosis, quantitative reasoning, analytical writing. And they do it dirt cheap compared to hiring a human. Here’s the uncomfortable…
I am a smart person. I’m writing this to tell you tricks that I’ve figured out how to be a smart person. Note that smart and successful are orthogonal concepts. Being smart makes it much easier for you to be successful, but there is a lot more to success than smartness- there’s work ethic, willingness to take (smart) risks, interpersonal skills, and a lot of luck (opportunity,…
Here’s something I’m thinking of lately: I think that open source SaaS and restrictive OSS licenses are in for a rocky road now that agentic coding is taking off. If your software is straightforward and it’s open source and you’re using licensing to enforce freemium, or if you are using freemium add-ons that aren’t open source, then you had better hope your moat is…
This post details my experiences creating software with LLM coding agents, emphasizing that what you do with AI agents is ‘creation’, not just ‘coding,’ and sharing what worked for me. This is not ‘The One True Path To AI Success.’ tl;dr: I’m not a professional developer, just a hobbyist with aspirations I wanted to accomplish a coding project beyond my skill level and have…
This post details my experiences creating software with LLM coding agents, emphasizing that what you do with AI agents is ‘creation’, not just ‘coding,’ and sharing what worked for me. This is not ‘The One True Path To AI Success.’ tl;dr: I’m not a professional developer, just a hobbyist with aspirations I wanted to accomplish a coding project beyond my skill level and have…
If you’ve ever walked down the strip in Las Vegas, you’ll encounter something strange - there will be people standing on the sidewalk trying to put business-card size ads in your hands, with pictures of beautiful women on them and phone numbers. (It’s exactly what you think it is, and I seriously doubt the pictures are real). I think that this is modern advertising in its purest…
Throughout my life I’ve seen a lot of opinions about prison sentence length, fines, whether we should have the death penalty, what is cruel and unusual punishment, etc. In the 90’s, for example, we had “tough on crime” laws, mandatory minimum sentences, “three strikes” laws, etc. Things always come full circle so it was no surprise (to me at least) that in the…
I’ve been struggling for a couple of years to try to get IPv6 support for my home. I use Frontier as my ISP. Frontier doesn’t support residential IPv6 in my area. I tried tunneling via Hurricane Electric (you should try this) but it was not satisfying and was way too much work. So I bought Starlink as a “backup” :-) ISP, which natively supports IPv6. Unfortunately I use…
I’m not bullish on cryptocurrency; in particular I’ve always thought that the proof-of-work infrastructure for mining and transaction clearing (Bitcoin and Ethereum) was too energy-wasteful and too slow to make it useful for commerce. Ethereum seems to have solved the energy problem by means of switching to proof-of-stake and somehow they’ve greatly improved the transaction speed…
I have worked in/with security software since about 1996. I have talked to hundreds or thousands of customers/users of security software over the years. One of the things that I hear people say frequently about security software is that it’s “noisy”. This observation is usually targeted at time series output like logs and so forth. After diving deep on a lot of these issues to…
I’m just jotting down a random idea here; maybe it’s not fully formed yet. I think that there are two main reasons that normal people eschew cryptocurrency: Transactions are irreversible and indisputable. Once the transaction is signed and confirmed, the crypto is gone forever. Normal humans just aren’t cut out to protect secret keys well, and one misstep can result in either…
Hey app developers, I appreciate that you are people with hopes and dreams and passions. However, the home screen on my phone is not an appropriate place for you to express your politics. I gave you consent (and likely money) to place and execute your code on my device to provide me with specific functionality. I’m pretty picky, so congratulations, your app was the best I could find that did…
Here’s my current list: Apple HomeKit (if you’re an Apple user). Otherwise [Samsung SmartThings(). DIY with open source controller are a huge time suck and you’ll constantly be doing custom integrations and hitting weird compatibility edge cases. Lighting & fan controls: Lutron Caseta . The switches themselves are high quality. They get the LED brightness level correct - the LEDs…
Friday I received my Schlage Encode Plus smart deadbolt lock, and this morning (Sunday) I installed it. I’ve been waiting for the release of this lock since I first read about its announcement at CES 2022 . I’m a picky smart home hobbyist. In my last home I went full Z-Wave with Samsung SmartThings for the controller, but my experience was meh (I’ll write that story someday).…
Great story I found online.
Found online: “Remember, the ‘S’ in ‘IoT’ stands for ‘Security’.”
It’s all about the benjamins .