Select By ID - A Podcast by Ibrahim Diallo

You don't need to pay to learn and to work as a programmer. All the tools are free, don't let people convince you otherwise.https://idiallo.com/blog/programming-tools-are-free

In a recent tweet, an entrepreneur claimed that an AI agent has deleted all his production databases. My question was how can anyone delete your database in the first place?In this episode, we explore the main question he should have asked, and how you can protect yourself in the future.

Content used to be a bad word. Now it's a billion-dollar strategy, and we're all paying the price.My very first day on the job happened to fall on February 2011. The exact day Google dropped its Panda update and wiped out an entire industry overnight. I watched a manager and lead dev scream at each other while the company's ad revenue hit exactly zero. Welcome to the world of content farms.In this video, I trace how "content" went from a dirty word to a career aspiration, and why it isn't a good thing. From the SEO spam era of the early 2010s to today's YouTube tutorials that make you sit through a NordVPN ad before telling you how to turn your water heater back on, the game hasn't really changed. Only the players have.Don't reduce yourself to a content strategy. Create things you're proud of.Source: - https://idiallo.com/blog/content-is-bad- https://idiallo.com/blog/create-content-or-create-art

Whenever I hear Sam Altman and Dario Amodei talking about AI, I'm reminded of Dune Prophecy. In the show, thinking machines are bad because they have attempted to kill all humans. So people are careful when building any machine, making sure that human input is necessary. But then, we have the heads of AI companies peddling the same danger. Why? They are the masters of this technology, and they are selling it. Why are they saying the tech is dangerous? The answer is simple. They are creating this doom narrative to legally prevent anyone else from competing with them. Join me as I break down this doomerism and make it more digestible for the rest of us.

Have you ever used Copilot? No not the one on your windows machine. No, not that one either. Not the one available through the web. I mean the other one. No not the one in Microsoft 365 apps. Oh, that's MS Office new name... i think. Ok, Microsoft has a branding problem. Let's get to it.

Imagine this for a moment. You are sitting across from a friend at a coffee shop. And suddenly they lean in over their latte. They look left. They look right and their voice drops to this dramatic whisper. Then, they tell you they have it! The billion dollar idea. The secret to early retirement.It's you know the app or the service or the website that is absolutely gonna change the world. I’m sure you have definitely been there. We have all been on the receiving end of that whisper. The reason we’ve been there is because the satisfaction in sharing ideas, is in the telling.That’s what I want to talk about today.

I've been sick for a couple weeks. I realized that when you don't have a voice, you can't record yourself. So here are a couple stories to bring us back on track. What do you do on a sunday evening? Come hangout with me, and I'll share a few stories with you.

While Hollywood films often portray digital tracking as a slow, dramatic countdown, real-world communication technology logs user data instantaneously through metadata and connection records. Every time a device connects to a network, it generates a digital trail that reveals the user's location and identity to service providers, regardless of how quickly they disconnect. While tools like HTTPS and end-to-end encryption successfully scramble the specific content of messages to ensure privacy, they cannot hide the fact that a connection occurred. Using a VPN merely shifts this trail from an internet provider to a third party rather than erasing it entirely. Ultimately, modern electronic communication is surveillance by design, where privacy efforts can make our data unreadable but never truly invisible.

According to his biography, Steve Jobs try to get high by depriving himself from sleep. I did the same, although it wasn't intentional. I was a brand new father of twin boys. They cried back to back at night, and I learned to operate with a couple of hours of sleep everyday. The result was I hallucinated my way through the job.

Earlier in my career, I found it really annoying when people gave the answer "It depends".I wanted a straight answer I could apply right away. But overtime, I've come to recognize my frustration was coming from not understand all the variables involved in answering my questions.

When the news broke that Meta's AI glasses users were getting their videos uploaded to the company's servers without consent, I wasn't shocked. Facebook is known for using customer data, so what was the news here?This has become the modern default for large companies. You don't have to accept it, don't normalize it. We can reject spying hardware.

We are starting to see cracks in the AI industry. Nvidia is backtracking its investment commitment, OpenAI is experimenting with ads, and the promises of AGI are even grandeur. AI is a useful tool that works great for some tasks, and fail at other. Maybe that's the peak of it all.

As a developer, a lost skill is the ability to read the source code of your favorite library and frameworks. The language is free, the tools are free, and open source gifts you with the source code not only to use for free, but to also read it. Make use of this super power to level up as a developer.

Platforms are designed to obscure the vendor names when you are purchasing a product. On Amazon, all products appear to be amazon products. They take in all the success. But when the product fails, you are quickly reminded that a 3rd party sold you the product. Customers become loyal platform users, and shun the vendors.

Mo Samuels is the free lancer who wrote all of Seth Godin books for just $10,000 a piece. But then again, it's very possible that he doesn't exist. Join me as I explore why people hate articles written by AI.

OpenAI is accusing Chinese companies from stealing from them to build their own smaller cheaper model. Last I checked, I never gave OpenAI to scrape my website and train on my content. Yet they did it anyway. They did it for the entire public web. They said it was "fair use"

There is a rich ecosystem the grows in the comment section of any popular article. It starts with people expressing their opinion in support or against the article. But this doesn't last very long. Soon enough, you see factions forming. Some people talk about the tech mentioned. Some talk about philosophy in general. Some introduce new elements and the discussion takes a life of it's own. I call these Factional Drifts. Join me as I explore 3 articles that went viral and they factions they created along the way.

The more you think, the better you get at it. But the opposite is also true. The mind is a muscle, and leave it unstrained and it will atrophy.

New programmers are facing a new reality. It's now pay to play. Every bootcamp or certificate requires you pay for some tools to learn the very basic. I'm here to tell you the free tools I've used in the past are still live and well. You don't need to break the bank to get started.

It's easy to spot bullshit jobs. You just work in exchange for a paycheck even if you know your employer doesn't really need you. It's not so different them misemployment. However, there are other classes of jobs that look important, seem important. But they are only a director's decision away from disappearing. Join me as I give you an extract of my book "Just Fired" Stories from the work place.

Years ago, I discovered a single line of code on our company's WordPress server that gave attackers complete control for three years. We patched it, learned our lesson, and moved on.Today, developers are doing the exact same thing, voluntarily, with AI agents like OpenClaw.In this episode, I tell the story of that WordPress hack and explain why modern AI assistants with broad system permissions are fundamentally insecure by design. We're downloading "skills" from the internet like we used to download random .exe files, except now they have access to our email, files, banking, and every app on our computers.Prompt injection attacks can't be fixed with better code. LLMs can't reliably distinguish between legitimate instructions and malicious ones embedded in the content they process. We're trading security for convenience, and the first major breaches are inevitable.Twelve years ago, I envisioned an AI assistant that would empower users while preserving privacy, local-first, with clear boundaries and manual approval for sensitive operations. We have the technology to build that today. We're just choosing not to.This is markdown.exe, and nobody seems to care.Topics covered: AI security, prompt injection, OpenClaw/Claude Desktop, agent vulnerabilities, WordPress hacks, local-first computing, privacy by architecture

Now all the apps are nowhere to be found. They discovered that the AI app builders are great at making a brochure like app that likes shiny and polished. But when you want it to do anything useful, you need to hire a developer.

We all make shitty software with bugs. The differentiator is how much we are willing to stick around and improve it when the excitement has faded.

Oracle is not a giant of tech because it makes great software. Instead, it's because they have great salesmen who can lock you into a contract for 10 years. No ingenuity can help you escape.

Have you ever watched an educational video like Veritasium and felt super smart? But then, when you want to explain the concept from the video, you brain falters? Very often, we feel smart because we pickup on the confidence of the person presenting the video. But the knowledge itself never makes it into our head.

Microsoft is in a campaign to alienate their most loyal users. I've been using multiple OS on a regular basis, but they are making it harder for me to work. It's time to ditch them for good.

When you go to a store, they ask you for your phone number casually. As if it is required to perform any transactions. This is data collection in disguise. Just remember, you don't have to share any information to buy anything. You have the power to say no.

What happens to your website after 100 years? How can you ensure that your work continues to exist and is accessible after you pass? There are two answers. One is: use paper. Paper is accessible, is sturdy and is easy to read. But what happens to a 100 year old blog that nobody reads?This brings us to the second method. Share your work recklessly, and don't worry about paper. Let your ideas brew in other people's mind and if it is worth it, they will keep it alive.

Behind our phones are experts and psychologist that are working tirelessly to manipulate us to increase engagement with their apps. They use the defense of "Use our app responsibly" to throw every tactic of manipulation at us. The strong willed user can resist, but for most of us we are at their mercy.

It's not often that you hear stories from inside the tech industry. It's easy to get lost in the hype and forget that there are real people working behind every product. As a tech worker, I've been telling these stories from the inside for a decade. Through this podcast, I will like to share my perspective and help you navigate through the hype and help you distinguish pure innovation from regurgitation. Join me in this 80th episode.

Adding a chatbot to your website doesn't automatically make it a better website. Instead, it just mops up the UI issues that you should focus on.

Being ghosted by my recruiter felt like a romantic break up. Join me in this adventure as I recount the tale and the struggles that I went through.

This podcast is not sponsored by NordVPN. Instead, I want you to differentiate marketing from the reality of using a VPN. They are useful for many cases, but they are not a tool that creates complete anonymity online.

This is a silly one. Signup at getproxyai.com for a 97% discount right now.

Those are the words we use whenever a person finds himself complaining about a job. Just get another job. It's almost always bad advice. Let's dive into the why.

As soon as you try to learn something interesting and the process starts to become hard, you feel bored. That's when we pull out our phones, watch youtube videos, scroll on tiktok, or do anything that will produce more dopamine then learning. I'm here to tell you that you are supposed to feel bored, and you have to power through it. Boredom is the gatekeeper that filter people who aren't worthy of the knowledge on the other side.

Before getting started on writing on your own blog, your own platform, we tend to have such an intimidating high bar. We may have great ideas, but wonder "What if I am wrong?"I'm here to tell you that this is the wrong attitude. Write it down, and learn to structure it right here in public.

I used to pay $3 for my 5-mile daily commute. Today, the exact same ride cost $24 dollars. That's what subsidy looks like when investors want their money back. Now, we are basically getting all these AI services for free. That's the result of investor subsidy. You can guess what happens next.

Every year, the same question is asked. Is Blogging dead? We could go around and research the subject, but instead I decided to test my own theory. For the year of 2025, I've blogged every other day, writing a total of 201 articles. The result is I saw a huge growth in both my RSS readership and daily traffic. I've been featured in the top 10 blog of the year on HackerNews. Let's get into the details.

This is it. We leave 2025 behind and embrace the new Year. Let's look back at what we've accomplished. I'm looking forward to what comes next.

LLM encourages everyone to take a shortcut. The Software Architect uses LLM to generate specs, introducing hallucinations. The developer uses LLM the generate the code, introducing errors. The review uses LLM to review the code, also propagating the issue. When the code fails in the hand of real users, nobody knows how to fix it. Nobody bothered to learn what the code was actually supposed to do. Join me in this episode as we tackle the problem and figure out a solution for the developer workflow.

No Exceptions * I know it is a bold claim. But there is a good reason I make it. When the vast majority of use cases of a tool is to spam, scam and trick people, we should just call it for what it is. There are simpler use cases that are harmless, but the problem is that they numb us to the harmful parts. Join me as I take you through my experience with AI videos.

One of the biggest hurdle in getting started is thinking about how others will perceive your work. "What if I suck?"Let me reassure you. When you are just getting started, no one is going to pay attention to you. And that's a good thing. Join me as I give you a more realistic approach, and perhaps a more sobering view that will help you get started.

Every avenue that implements gamification will slowly fall into gamblification. When believe that everything fun is good, including education, we slowly turn into gamblers. In fact, it becomes the natural next step. Join me as I take you through the journey of how apps turn you into a gambler.

I started my career with PHP and jQuery. It was a refreshing simple and low barrier of entry for anyone who wanted to start a career in tech. It's rare to see any tool that has as much impact. Even with AI, people still have a hard time getting started because tools like these are no longer at the forefront. Join me as I discuss what we gained and what we lost.

We've created a hiring system that reject all candidates and hire only those who can game the system. Gen Z has adapted to it, and we are mad at the way they apply. "hi, hire me, thanks"That's the message I got. Let me tell you why this is not a rude message.

After 15 years, I can assure you. I don't interview for Jobs. I audition. Why? Because the job interview and the position you are being hired for are two different things. Join me in this episode where we dig into the experience.Original Article

The cloud isn't a magical thing in the sky. It's real servers bolted to the ground with steel and concrete. Join me in this podcast where I dig into the real impact of data centers both on our resources and communities.

A movie theater clerk asks to see your ID. You show it through the glass, they glance at it for three seconds, hand it back, and forget about it. The information never leaves that moment. But when you upload that same ID online for verification, everything changes. It goes on a permanent digital journey through servers, databases, and third-party services you've never heard of—each one a potential point of failure that you'll never control.In this episode, we explore why "please verify your identity" means something fundamentally different online versus offline. Starting with a personal story from a Santa Monica movie theater and a toddler who received a data breach notification before he could talk, we examine how digital verification transforms a simple, contained transaction into unbounded, permanent risk.Companies promise to delete your ID after verification, but a recent dating app breach revealed photos stored for years despite deletion claims. Files never truly delete—they live in backups, get converted into multiple formats, get shared with subcontractors you never agreed to work with. Even state-of-the-art encryption might not protect you from "Harvest Now, Decrypt Later" attacks where adversaries collect encrypted data today to decrypt with quantum computers tomorrow.The convenience of digital verification comes with a hidden cost: we trade the ephemeral nature of human interaction for the permanent vulnerability of digital storage. Unlike that theater clerk who forgot your birthdate seconds after seeing it, computers have perfect memory. And once your data enters the digital world, you lose control of it forever. The question isn't whether these systems will be compromised, but when."This physical verification, flawed as it may be, keeps the risk contained to that single moment. Online verification, however, creates an entirely different category of risk.""When a company promises to delete your ID after they verify it, there's no way to verify that claim. In computer parlance, there's no such thing as truly deleting a file.""We're trading permanent digital vulnerability for temporary convenience. And we're doing it so often that we've stopped thinking about what we're actually giving away."

News headlines claimed that 30% of microsofts code is AI generated. Digging deeper, I found the quotes used in news outlets. But then, when I watched the actual interview, where Satya Nadella made the statement as an answer to Mark Zuckerberg, the statement was not made with much confidence. My main question was, how do you track code that is AI generated, vs Human written, vs Copy-pasta from Stackoverflow?