Stop Uploading Your Data to Google  ## Metadata - Author: [[Changelog Master Feed]] - Full Title: Stop Uploading Your Data to Google - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/94a15007-cfca-42e2-ae73-e9de4b6c2078 ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Lukas Mathis' Google Data Risk** - Lukas Mathis shared a personal story about risking devastating data loss by relying heavily on his Google account. - His experience prompted him to stop uploading data to Google and rethink service dependencies. Transcript: Jerod Santo Data to Google. A few years ago, Lucas Mathis realized that losing access to his Google account would have been devastating. Quote, I had photos and emails dating back to the mid-90s on my Google account. I had auto upload enabled on my phone's Google Photos account. What are the chances that one of these hundreds of thousands of pieces of data would trigger some automatic action at some point? What are the chances that I could get in touch with somebody who could fix this for me? End quote. Those are good questions to ask and he isn't merely being paranoid. There are instances of this actually happening to real people and it's never you until it's you. ([Time 0:00:56](https://share.snipd.com/snip/670549f0-0f96-467b-9f4f-fcf71d48f6e5)) - **Avoid Google Uploads, Self-Host** - Stop uploading data to Google unless essential and self-host services where possible. - Use end-to-end encrypted services and single-purpose tools to minimize risk if disabled. Transcript: Jerod Santo And then it's too late. Lucas set some rules for himself. One, do not upload any data to Google. My Google account is too important to risk it. Now, no services are tied to it except for those that must be tied to it. Two, self-host as much as possible. Three, if self-hosting is not possible, use end-to encrypted services whenever possible. And four, use one service for one thing so that when it gets disabled, only that thing is affected. Click ([Time 0:01:34](https://share.snipd.com/snip/e574c7cc-8a5a-4549-877e-427b2f6aefda)) - **Use Accept-Language Header** - Avoid using IP geolocation to guess user language because it's often inaccurate. - Instead, rely on the accept-language HTTP header, which explicitly communicates user language preferences. Transcript: Jerod Santo If you're still using IP geolocation to decide what language to show, stop screwing around. It's a broken assumption dressed up as a feature. IP tells you where the request came from. That's it. It doesn't tell you what language the user wants, speaks, or even understands. It fails all the time. VPNs, travel, people living abroad, countries with multiple official languages. This isn't cleverness. It gives outright annoyance. End quote. I have to agree with him. That's why the accept language header exists, which Robert advocates for in this post. It lets your user agent send your preferred language to the server. No guessing required. Quote, that's your signal. Use it. It's accurate. It's free. It's already there. No ([Time 0:02:12](https://share.snipd.com/snip/a425c0a2-7af9-45f6-b706-3644e15a4106)) - **Software Skills Are Superpowers** - Software engineering skills currently provide great power to automate tedious tasks quickly. - AI agents extend this ability to many more people, increasing productivity exponentially. Transcript: Jerod Santo Software talent is gold right now. Tom from GameTorch wrote us a good reminder about how amazingly privileged we are as software developers, despite the not so great job market right now. Quote, if you have software engineering skills right now, you can take any really annoying problem that you know could be automated, but it's too painful to even start. You could type up a few paragraphs in your favorite human text editor to describe your problem in a well-defined way, and then paste that in the cursor with O3 Max pulled up and it will One-shot the automation script in about three minutes. This gives you superpowers. I'm not just a technical founder. Now I'm also an entire marketing department. That's pretty cool. What can you do? I bet you can do a lot. End quote. I take for granted just how much tedium I've automated away that non-software people just live with. AI agents bring this ability to many more people, which is awesome, but they also make we software people able to do so much more with so much less effort. I ([Time 0:03:08](https://share.snipd.com/snip/99ad53d4-f2b6-4567-806b-4a245f0b0f2c)) - **AI Transforms Observability Tools** - Observability tools are shifting from human interpretation of telemetry data to AI-powered automatic analysis. - AI agents can diagnose complex system issues quickly and efficiently, changing system operation paradigms. Transcript: Jerod Santo As we know it. Surprise, surprise, LLMs are upending the observability industry too. Austin Parker from Honeycomb does a solid job laying out the history and how it's all going to change from here. Quote, in a really broad sense, the history of observability tools over the past couple of decades have been about a pretty simple concept. How do we make terabytes of heterogeneous telemetry data comprehensible to human beings? We've seen different companies tackle this in different ways for technology like Ruby on Rails, AWS, Kubernetes, and now OpenTelemetry. In AI, I see the death of this paradigm. It's already real, it's already here, and it's going to fundamentally change the way we approach systems design and operation in the future, end quote. Austin goes on to describe how Honeycomb's favorite demo for Honeycomb's favorite feature has been utterly disrupted by agentic AI. Quote, I ran a single prompt through an AI agent that read as follows. Please investigate the odd latency spikes in the front end service that happen every four hours or so and tell me why they're happening. It took 80 seconds, made eight tool calls, and not only did it tell me why those spikes happened, it figured it out in a pretty similar manner to how we tell you to do it with BubbleUp. This isn't a contrived example. I basically asked the agent the same question we'd ask you in a demo, and the agent figured it out with no additional prompts, training, or guidance. It effectively zero-shot ([Time 0:05:30](https://share.snipd.com/snip/138dc021-2b80-45c2-8d8e-47eaf41640dc)) - **Vitess Co-Creator Joins Supabase** - Sugu Sougoumarane, co-creator of Vitess, is joining Supabase to lead an adaptation of Vitess for Postgres called Multigres. - He chose Supabase for their open-source culture and remote work environment. Transcript: Jerod Santo Cents. Multigress is Vitesse for Postgres. Supabase landed an epic hire, bringing Vitesse co-creator Sugu Sugimurain, apologize on the pronunciation, on to lead their effort on a Vitesse adaptation for Postgres. Here's what Sugu had to say about it. Quote, For some time, I've been considering a Vitesse adaptation for Postgres, and this feeling had been gradually intensifying. The recent explosion in the popularity of Postgres has fueled this into a full-blown obsession. As these databases grow, users are going to face a hard limit once they max out the biggest available machine. The project to address this problem must begin now, and I'm convinced that Vitesse provides the most promising foundation. After exploring various environments, I found the best fit with Supabase. I'm grateful for how they welcomed me. Furthermore, their open-source mindset and fully remote work culture resonated with me. End quote. Multigress will be open source Apache 2 and they're assembling a team to build it. If you're a Go programmer, consider applying. Link in the newsletter. That's the news for now. Have a great week. ([Time 0:07:00](https://share.snipd.com/snip/23921ea6-3d59-412d-8548-1767f635839d))