Oct 20, 2026, 6:00 PMit either took a lot of effort to make the private key the number 4 as a joke, or it took no effort at all to let an LLM fuck it up
I’m leaning towards the LLM explanation because “this xkcd in our plagarized training data says 4 is a random number and a bunch of other text references that” is exactly how LLMs pick numbers, and I can’t really imagine a scenario in which this joke is *for* anyone
Oct 20, 2026, 6:02 PM“but no professional responsible for a CA’s private key would think an LLM could generate random numbers” oh my sweet summer child
Oct 20, 2026, 6:04 PMOct 20, 2026, 6:13 PMJohn Random has been handling the private keys for his CA for the last 15 years. he wrote the command line tooling for securely generating new key materiel and also several well-respected books on the topic of generating random numbers
unfortunately, Johnny now thinks a program on his computer is sentient and his best friend because a corporation told him it was, and that program is now the thing that handles the private keys for his CA