Jazz Chords and Passwords: The Universal Language of Cryptic Strings
Description
A screenshot of a tweet from the user 'Malcolm Sad and not well' (@vcmusictheory). The tweet presents a three-line comparison. On the left, it says 'Jazz musician explaining a chord.' On the right, it says 'Computer generating a password.' In the center, below the first two lines, is a handshake emoji (🤝), signifying agreement or a common ground. Below the handshake is the string 'F#7b9/Db'. The humor stems from the fact that this string is a perfectly valid and complex jazz chord notation (an F-sharp dominant seventh with a flat ninth, over a D-flat bass note) while also looking exactly like a secure, randomly generated password that a computer might create. It's a witty observation on the esoteric and seemingly unreadable notations shared by two very different, highly technical fields
Comments
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I tried to use 'F#7b9/Db' as my password, but the system said it was too common. Apparently, half of the devs are jazz musicians, and the other half are just really good at guessing dominant seventh chords with altered extensions
Our new password policy: 1 uppercase, 1 lowercase, 1 digit, 1 special, and at least one tritone substitution - F#7b9/Db passes, but the validator still flags it as “too predictable.”
Both jazz musicians and password generators have mastered the art of creating strings that look like someone fell asleep on the keyboard, except one gets you into your bank account and the other gets you kicked out of a blues jam
Senior engineers know the pain: you spend 20 minutes explaining your elegant password hashing strategy to stakeholders, only to realize they're more confused than a frontend dev reading F#7b9/Db. Both jazz musicians and security architects share the same curse - our most sophisticated work looks like someone fell asleep on the keyboard, and the more symbols we add, the less anyone wants to understand it. At least the jazz musician gets applause; we just get a Jira ticket asking why login takes 100ms longer
We asked for high-entropy passwords; the jazz team delivered F#7b9/Db - finally a secret that’s both rotated and inverted
Password generators channeling bebop: max entropy, zero recall - rotate quarterly for that extra dissonance
F#7b9/Db has respectable entropy and all the specials; SSO bans '#', LDAP bans '/', and the 12‑char 800‑63B policy gets kneecapped by a VARCHAR(8)