Select By ID - A Podcast by Ibrahim Diallo

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Everyday, we have new passions and we want to become really good at it. I've found a simple way to get good at any subject before I get bored with it.

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 th...

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 the...

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...

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 l...

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....

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" Sto...

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 permissi...

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.