(back)
Here's what I've been reading, watching, and listening to:
Woof!
The communication app TeleMessage Signal, used by at least one top Trump administration official to archive messages, has already reportedly suffered breaches that illustrate concerning security flaws and resulted in its parent company imposing a service pause this week pending investigation. Now, according to detailed new findings from the journalist and security researcher Micah Lee, TM Signal’s archiving feature appears to fundamentally undermine Signal’s flagship security guarantees, sending messages between the app and a user’s message archive without end-to-end encryption, thus making users’ communications accessible to TeleMessage.
No doubt the complexity of winding a company down ramps up with scale, but these companies also have investors and counsel to leverage. Perhaps they’ll look to this company as The Wolf.
The thought of this company raising 15M blows my mind.
I loved this memo from Tobi Lutke, particularly this bit:
Using AI effectively is now a fundamental expectation of everyone at Shopify. It’s a tool of all trades today, and will only grow in importance. Frankly, I don’t think it’s feasible to opt out of learning the skill of applying AI in your craft; you are welcome to try, but I want to be honest I cannot see this working out today, and definitely not tomorrow. Stagnation is almost certain, and stagnation is slow-motion failure. If you’re not climbing, you’re sliding.
and this this bit:
AI must be part of your GSD Prototype phase. The prototype phase of any GSD project should be dominated by AI exploration. Prototypes are meant for learning and creating information. AI dramatically accelerates this process. You can learn to produce something that other team mates can look at, use, and reason about in a fraction of the time it used to take.
GSD is a reference to Shopify’s product development process, which stands for “get shit done”. How can you not love that?
Great company, great product
Interestingly, both the earliest and most experienced engineers find tremendous value in using AI in their day-to-day, while mid-career stage engineers are more pessimistic.
Fantastically helpful framing
Nice. This is 100K more than what has traditionally been offered to startups, and should give founders more room to get their legs under them.
Poor connectivity. No toilet paper. Coming to an office for virtual meetings all day without proper space for meetings. I’ve worked through this a few times. Return to office (RTO) requires proper planning and sufficient resources. It’s a self-own to reduce the federal workforce to cut costs and increase efficiency while making it more difficult to work — we’re months away from people feeling government is getting worse at doing its job and serving the people locally. Not good.