I dunno, I've noticed quite a bit of hesitancy. Like they want to figure out "which kind" of American you are before they will even nudge the topic of US politics.
There was an ulterior motive and the impact was deliberate.
Further down the article:
> O'Neal was brought in by Bezos this summer after the corporate titan tore up his paper's opinion section.
> Bezos said he wanted a tight focus on two priorities: personal liberties and free markets. The top opinion page editor resigned. A raft of prominent columnists and contributors resigned or departed as well. Some were let go.
More like, several wealthy people from Silicon Valley funded campaigns to put a government in place which is now encouraging Silicon Valley and other business to bend the knee to the political institutions.
Yeah, historically a lot of the aggregators of cellular location data have had huge security issues.
One of them even had a demo page open to the internet that just had a 'Has consent?" checkbox. Showed me my own location within two blocks without any real validation of consent. No options from the vendor to disable this.
Contacting T-Mobile just gets you a PO Box you can mail a letter to.
I'm sorry, but there's "move fast and break things" and then there's a group of junior devs not even bothering to google a checklist of development or moving to production best practices.
Your Joe AI customers should be worried. Anyone actually using the RankBid you did a Show HackerNews on 8 months ago should be worried (particularly by the "Secure by design: We partner with Stripe to ensure your data is secure." line.
If you don't want to get toasted by some future failure where you won't be accidentally saved by a vendor, then maybe start learning more on the technical side instead of researching and writing blogspam like "I Read 10 Business Books So You Don't Have To".
This might sound harsh, but it's intended as sound advice that clearly nobody else is giving you.
Thanks for the feedback, I really appreciate it. Rankbid and other projects I've made, I built from scratch myself. They have strong, solid, technical foundations. Try them for yourself, even try to hack them if you want if it proves my point.
This was not the case of Joe AI. I joined later in the project, and the foundations where even weaker than what is shown in this newsletter (no API endpoint authentication whatsoever, open bar, for example) and so I had to secure and migrate everything myself when I joined them. This was what the Supabase migration was trying to accomplish. Before I joined, they didn't even have a database but I won't get into the details here.
Before Rankbid, and the other products I've built, I've worked at a B2C startup with millions of users and never caused a big outage there, I've been programming for more than ten years, and I have a double degree in computer science, and while I agree with what "should be done" in theory for production level apps, sometimes, you need to move very fast to build great startups. I've read many technical books in my life such as Designing Data Intensive Applications, High Performance Browser Networking. I know the theory, but sometimes you just don't have the time to do everything perfectly. That's what I try to expose in this blog post. I also wanted to share a humbling experience. Everyone makes mistakes, and I'm not ashamed of making some, even after years of software engineering.
My newsletter is about the intersection of programming and business. You might not find the "business" part interesting which is fine, but I think what you call blogspam has real value for engineers who have never sold before in their life and want to learn the ropes. I spend a lot of time writing each edition, because I try to respect the time of my readers as much as possible to deliver some actual insights (even if there is a bit of fluff or story telling sometimes).
And for Joe AI: it has since become much more secure, and is progressively implementing engineering best practices, so customers don't have to worry.
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