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EU Tech Independence, Another OpenAI Lawsuit & Digital Privacy Crisis | SS #37

• Kevin Dowdy

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This week on Software Sundays, KD explores why countries are racing to take back control of their digital infrastructure and what that means for engineers, founders, and the future of technology.

We begin with the European Union's latest tech sovereignty initiative and why governments are investing billions into homegrown chips, cloud providers, AI companies, and data centers instead of relying on U.S. and Chinese technology. Then we unpack Apple's lawsuit against OpenAI, what it reveals about the growing competition for AI talent, intellectual property, and the next generation of AI hardware.

We also discuss growing concerns around digital privacy after reports that one of the world's largest smartphone manufacturers has been collecting extensive user data across millions of devices, and why cybersecurity, governance, and digital sovereignty are becoming national priorities.

 In this week's engineering Q&A, KD explains how to successfully introduce new technologies into enterprise teams, why engineers should rarely SSH directly into production servers, what a server actually is, why technology literacy is becoming as important as financial literacy, and how the Document Object Model (DOM) powers modern web applications.

The episode closes with a reminder that boredom isn't always something to escape—it can become one of your greatest tools for clarity, focus, and intentional decision-making.

 

Timestamps:

00:00 Introduction to the EU's Tech Sovereignty Plan

01:41 EU's Focus on Digital Infrastructure and Self-Reliance

03:26 US and China Policies Driving EU's Digital Strategy

05:19 Investments in EU Data Centers and Cloud Infrastructure

06:46 Talent and Innovation in the EU Tech Ecosystem

08:53 Legal Challenges and Cybersecurity Risks

10:34 The Hardware Revolution in AI and Its Market Impact

12:16 The Future of Human-Technology Interaction

14:01 Legal Battles and Competition in AI Development

15:41 Insider Risks and Data Security in Tech Companies

17:48 Privacy Concerns and Data Privacy Risks

19:26 Risks of Relying on External Technology Providers

21:18 Building Resilient Digital Infrastructure in the EU

23:02 Opportunities for Builders and Developers in the EU

25:07 The Role of Automation and Scripting in Security Governance

26:58 Best Practices for Managing Production Server Access

28:34 Understanding Servers and Backend Systems

30:27 The Importance of Technology Literacy in Modern Life

32:20 The Document Object Model and Front-End Development

34:04 Security Considerations for Front-End Applications

35:53 The Impact of Technology on Daily Life and Society

37:43 The Future of AI Hardware and Human-Technology Interfaces

38:55 Legal and Ethical Issues in AI and Data Privacy

40:42 The Significance of Digital Infrastructure Investment

42:15 Cybersecurity and Data Privacy Risks in a Global Context

44:21 Practical Tips for Enhancing Digital Security

45:51 Automation and Efficiency in Security Management

48:03 The Value of Boredom and Mindfulness in Decision-Making

49:44 Final Thoughts and Personal Reflections

 

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DISCLAIMER: This episode is for informational purposes only and should not be considered legal, financial, business, or tax advice. The opinions expressed are KD's own or those of referenced sources. Always consult qualified professionals before making important decisions.

Build Learn Impact exists to help our community create wealth and opportunity through technology.

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SPEAKER_00

Welcome to Software Sundays Builders. I'm your host, KD, and in this series we have high-level conversations about technology and the impact that it has on our community. I want you to be able to walk away with the skills that you need in order to grow your income, become an owner, and help shape what happens next in this world. This is your first time tuning in, you are in the right place. And if you've been rocking with us for a minute, it is great to have you back. Welcome back. Let's jump into it. So, first up for the news for this week, a continuation of the conversation that we've been having with the EU and their issues with some of the policies coming out of the US. The European Union just unveiled their latest tech sovereignty plan. This plan is another step towards them reshoring their supply chain, but not just the digital infrastructure, but including the chips, data centers, energy. They're also looking to make sure that all of their software providers, from the cloud service providers to their AI companies, all of that is homegrown and growing inside of their own ecosystem. So again, they have decided that it is too dangerous to continue to rely on technology coming out of the US and China. And this is one of our partners. So that is something that has been, I'd say, growing in terms of importance for a few years. They've been looking and been considering ways to become more self-reliant. They've been looking for ways to move away from just having US companies dominate their economy, their systems, and basically they just use and consume all of these services coming out of the US and China. But recently, with some of the changes in terms of policy, like recently, Anthropic being unable to export, quote unquote, their AI models or different policies that impact their ability to access chips and strategic materials that they need in order to increase their economic productivity, but also their military capabilities, like a lot of that technology, they're relying on the US for it. And one of the interesting parts, and I mentioned it from I believe last week or a few weeks ago, with them considering looking at, I think it was GCP or Google Cloud, Azure, and AWS, or specifically AWS inside of the EU region, and how that was one of their focuses to see if if the AWS counted as a marketplace that was being unfairly managed and unfairly controlled by Amazon. So that news just came out a few weeks ago, and today or a few days ago, they decided that they need to create or at least innovate and invest inside of their own cloud service provider. So they looked at Amazon as competition that they would have to get around if they were to invest inside of their own cloud service provider. Because Amazon already has a majority of the market share of businesses and governments, municipalities, everything that is actually using AWS or they're using Azure or they're using GCP. Those are the big three CSPs in the market right now. So it was interesting that just a few weeks after that announcement, they're saying that we need to control our entire software stack. And one of the reasons, which makes sense, I think one of the representatives from the EU forgot her name right now, but she basically said that we should not be relying on external governments, external partners to provide technology that is powering our government, our health care, our energy, and all of these critical infrastructure industries that you really cannot live without, especially in the current age, having all of those services being almost 100% reliant on what's coming out of a partner today, but someone who could potentially turn off that system if they decided that there was some disagreement that, or I say disagreement, or even a change in how they thought about that relationship. Any of those things could happen and result in them basically losing access to something that they need in order to provide the services that their people, that the entire nation relies on. So it makes sense from the EU perspective why they're trying to go this route. But one of the questions I thought about was are they actually capable of getting it done? There are going to be more investments made inside of the EU regions. I mentioned a few weeks ago, SoftBank investing a few million dollars into developing a data center, a new data center inside of France. And they'll probably get, and they're figuring out financing and investments for other builds like that. They have some really innovative companies. They have ASML, which is one of the link pins to this current AI revolution and the advancements inside of GPUs and the different semiconductors that are available in the market. They have ARM, which is one of the major companies that provided chips and design chips and the software for a lot of the operating systems that most computers rely on today. And they have Mistral AI, which is one of the better foundational model providers. So they have a history of innovating, but the question is, will they have enough talent available, enough capital available inside of their region to allow them to hit the targets that they want? I saw inside of their proposal that they want to triple the amount of data center capacity that they have today. Tripling that capacity is not something you can just give to AI. That's not going to be like an AI project, you let the model or the agent do that. That's going to require some very sophisticated project management and technical skills from whoever is managing that project. So it's something that you have to have enough people on the ground to manage it, to drive it, and to make sure nothing messes up. Because if they're going to spend these millions of dollars, if not billions of dollars, on this infrastructure, it has to work. If they're going to try to transition the majority of their economy to move from AWS and these other big three CSPs to some other competitor, to some other CSP that they are kind of grooming, then they're going to have to make sure the reliability of that system is worth transitioning to. So that's something to keep in mind for any of the builders in the EU or even in the US and beyond. This is an opportunity to actually show off your skills and your talent and go somewhere where that investment is being made. If you feel like where you're at, it's difficult to get some of the roles that you're looking for. They're going to be hiring network administrators, they're going to be hiring database admins, they're going to be hiring software engineers, cloud engineers, all of these roles that have kind of matured inside of the US and other regions. They're going to need those roles because they're going to be rebuilding their infrastructure. And I say them, but all over the world, different countries are rebuilding their infrastructure to have a more sovereign relationship to the digital services that they need to drive their countries. So definitely something to keep in mind and think about if you're looking for opportunities. And some additional news and related to the talent wars that we're seeing is Apple is suing OpenAI for trade secret deaths. And this is incredibly interesting. Not only from a like uh I'll say a business standpoint, where I think for decades, Silicon Valley has been known for some cutthroat business practices. Back in the 90s, people were stealing designs for software and hardware to from other companies through employees. So in my mind, it's really not uncommon. It's not surprising to see that we live in a kind of nasty world from that perspective. And I want to say that so it has been happening. Between OpenAI and that case is still like allegedly, OpenAI was coaching people from Apple to come in and join their team. But before they join, make sure that they were able to pull IP, pull private documents and all sorts of you know, secrets before they finally left Apple. And that first of all, that's not okay, right? Well, we know it's not okay, even though it may have been happening for decades. And not related to like the talent theft, but technically related to the brain drain out of Apple to open AI, is the fact that Johnny Ives and some other you know high-level hardware executives from Apple. A few years ago, they had formed their own company, IO Products, which was designed to develop new age, new generation hardware that would integrate with AI. And recently, or I think a few months ago, maybe last year, OpenAI purchased that company. That company now is helping OpenAI to create their next products, their products that will do more than just be the software layer for AI. They're trying to see how to integrate AI into your day-to-day life to make it a some type of interface that would allow you to connect with AI inside of your daily life, inside of your normal operations throughout your day. And so there's been a lot of energy that has kind of gone from Apple into OpenAI and is helping them to grow. And a lot of this energy is making it clear how important the hardware space is going to be over the next decade because we're looking at these companies accelerating some of their plans to how do we actually operation operationalize AI beyond just a chatbot that you connect to, beyond just an automation that can do a few things inside of the internet or on the internet. How do we make it have a little bit more touch points, a little bit more activity and access to the world that we're living in? So that could be through sensors, that could be through cameras, that could be through listening. Like however they figure out this AI hardware integration is going to potentially disrupt, I would say, the smartphone market. Because right now, most people that came in touch with the internet, especially over the last 10 years, did so through a smartphone. That's how a lot of people outside of the US especially have started, you know, interacting on the internet and getting access to the internet was through a smartphone. And that took years to actually get to where we are today. The question is, what is that next medium? What is that next device that people use to access the internet? To access AI, to access each other. What does that look like? And how much of that is going to be driven by AI? How much of that is going to touch AI? And what is that going to look like from a like a say a style perspective? Like we see in Metaglasses or other glasses that are integrated with your phone. We're seeing Apple releasing, or at least talking about some designs with their AirPods being able to have cameras, so there are certain pendants. We're um looking at IoT with oral rings and different devices that are more directly connected to your body. We're definitely becoming, and I'll say becoming, maybe we already are, cyborgs. If like if you can't put the phone down, if you have your glasses on at all times, if your computer is right next to you, or your mouse in hand, like is like it is with me often, like you're a cyborg for as much as the term is like a human that is directly connected to technology. And the connection isn't like it's not plugged into you, not yet. You know, Neuralink is working on it, but there are we're finding different ways to either improve, advance, innovate, or change that human technology interface and how we actually interact with the technology we have available to us. And that might just be a voice. Like if you have AirPods on and you have metaglasses that could provide an AR screen, then you have a way to see what the computer is showing you, and you have a way to listen to what it's telling you. But you also have your voice, which you can use to tell it what to do. You can use it to direct the mouse or direct different clicks. Like, this is all potential ways we could actually interact with technology, but it's going to definitely represent a totally different shift inside of that relationship. And a lot of it is being built off of like these battles and these competitions between these different companies. And something like, I really don't think OpenAI needs any more lawsuits. Like, they just got out of one with Elon Musk. And if they're going to go into this lawsuit, it's going to take years to finish. It's going to require a significant amount of money to actually pay for the litigation. And for a company that might be having challenges to maintain their profitability, I don't know. Like, I really don't think they need it. It's just another expense that's going to impact and challenge them. But it really speaks to, again, the competition that we're seeing. Like, it's no longer just the models being something that people want to improve and get right. These companies are deciding, like, we gotta get the model right. We gotta get the hardware that the model runs on right. And at some point, they're going to get into designing their own chips. The chips that create the hardware that make up the hardware. Like that entire supply chain is something that an intelligent company might decide to kind of bring in-house if they can make it work. But it definitely also speaks to the insider risk that comes from being inside of these technology companies where a lot of your IP, a lot of the value that comes from the company is held inside of the IP. So things like zero trust, least privilege, separation of duties, and even need to know these types of concepts are not just things to consider. It's not just a nice to have. You have to have this inside of your organization. You have to have access management. You have to make sure you have policies and automations in place to remove access from users that are no longer with the firm or that are maybe potential risks to the firm and our business organization. So, or business objectives. Definitely something to keep in mind from a cybersecurity perspective as well. Because you don't want to see your IP making someone else rich. And another story that caught my eye this week was that there is an increasingly common lack of privacy in a digital first world. And I'm sure everyone knows that. For years, people have been selling either knowingly or unknowingly selling their data, and that data has been used to increase advertising or targeted advertising to those people. It's been used to train some of these AI models that we have in the wild in the wild, and it's been used inside of certain investigations, whether criminal or civil, depending on who was involved. But one of the largest phone manufacturers in the world, Transhin, which is a Chinese company, and they have a few different phone brands or smartphone brands. They have been found, or their devices have been found, to be tracking dozens, if not hundreds, of data points from users' devices and the apps that they use. From the camera to like camera, uh opening time apps and things that open the camera to their location, to the different tools that they're using on the phone, the apps themselves. Like it's tracking millions of users inside of Africa and certain places in South America. And this is again one of I think the top one of the top four, if not the fourth largest phone manufacturer in the world. So they have a significant amount of market share, and a significant amount of their phones are being used to potentially encroach on the privacy of the users that rely on them. And again, it ties directly to the tech sovereignty push that we're seeing from the EU. Because if you are a country or a company, and most of your employees or citizens are relying on a technology, a tool, a phone that's coming from a company or a country not inside of your control or not inside of your jurisdiction, where the governance models, where the rules, where the policies that they follow may not actually abide and agree and align with what you have, there's a risk that that device can become another surface area for attack. And so the question that you need to ask, whether you are a nation or a company, is what risks are you allowing by letting someone else provide the thing that you rely on? So I even we have when reading the story, it got me thinking about like Maslow's hierarchy of needs and how security is really one of the lower level needs inside of that pyramid. But if you delegate your security to someone else, someone that you may or may not trust, how do you, I guess, how do you live with that decision when they potentially may breach that level of trust? Because right now, just pulling data outside of your country may not be an issue, but if they're pulling that data to target people inside of your country, right? Because every device has a unique identity. So they know exactly who the device belongs to, they know where they are at this moment, they know some of their habits. If they can have that type of information and bring that to a potential foreign adversary, that represents a risk. If you have employees that are accessing your network and the devices that they use are not locked down, then that represents a risk that some of the IP that your company relies on could be extracted from your company, from your network, and you might not even have any idea that that's happening. So, and also, this is not like a thing where I'm saying this is only foreign companies. It's not just a Chinese thing or an African thing or something like that. This is definitely a practice that happens inside of the US. Again, there are companies and apps that definitely sell your data. They collect it, store it, sell it, whether to the government or to other companies for profit. I'm only highlighting that it's maybe a little bit more sinister when someone outside of your country, when outside of your entity, is doing it because you don't know what they're going to do with it. At least if you're inside of your company and you're using a company phone, or you're inside of your country and using a phone that is being accessed by your government, you kind of know what your government is capable of, you know what they're going to do with it. If you don't have any understanding of that country or that company, there's no telling what they'll do with that information. So this is more like a cybersecurity issue, but a security issue if you're thinking about the sovereignty of everyone who uses and relies on these devices, which again is everyone. That's how we navigate the world today. And so I'd say the theme for these stories is that it's never too late to invest inside of your digital infrastructure. But the longer you wait, the more likely it is that you put yourself at the mercy of some other company, some other government, or some other person. Because if they can determine how you access their technology and when you access their technology, they can always shut it down. That always presents a risk for anything that you rely on that you need that relies on what they're providing to you as a service. So you have to be able to balance that risk, balance that need and even the convenience. Sometimes it is out of convenience, but what is it worth to you and your goals moving forward? So if you want to go deeper into any of these topics and the opportunities they create for you and your family, join BLI University. Every week we are discussing the biggest shifts that are happening behind the scenes with the community of builders that are leading the evolution. So we're going to jump into our QA section now. What is the engineering tip of the week? So this week I have been, not say even for the last couple of weeks, I've been transitioning some of the scripts and automations that my team uses for security governance from some of our existing platforms over to plat to Python. We've kind of relied heavily on UiPath, Excel, Power BI, and these other tools to manage a lot of our workflows. But I recently started relying more heavily on Python and building scripts and automations that use Python to process the data that we are managing. But my the tip I would say is that if you're advocating for something new, make sure that you're doing the research in advance. And research is not just a research on the tool, it's not just saying you understand how this tool works and what the you know the benefits and pros are of that tool. It's understanding the questions that your team is going to ask you about integrating this tool. And those questions may be related to performance, but it may also be related to reliability and how do we actually transition safely. It's not just saying let's implement this new tool. If you implement this new tool, that means everyone on the team needs to start using this tool. They need to either get training, they need to get training to use the tool, or even just to run it. You may need to install different runtimes, you may need to install different packages. Like that operational overhead requires some type of change inside of your team and inside and inside of the processes that your team uses. So have those answers ready. Have something to point to or to show the team to help make that transition easier because they're going to ask. And especially if you're in a regulated environment or your company is in a regulated environment, the major consideration is not just using a shiny new tool. The thing that everyone wants to make sure is up to date or make sure is functioning properly is risk management. We want to make sure that whatever we implement and integrate into our environment, it actually works. And it's actually something we can trust to just turn on and trust the results. A lot of times with new technology, you can't be 100% sure how it's going to work over time because it hasn't had that track record. So it's one of those things you might hear inside of the industry that you know, boring is always better. Like you don't want to continue and always use the latest technology. If there is some problem that is being felt where you actually need some new technology or some new tool to integrate with, then by all means use it. But you have to be very mindful. And if you're going to do that, understand what you're saying. It's not just saying we're going to start using this tool. We're going to start educating the team members. We're going to start uh updating our technology and our tools on our devices. That represents something that you may not have been doing previously. And yeah, even if it's an inevitable, like even if the tool has to be used, you have to understand that risk management perspective. You have to make sure that when you present this idea, you have considered all of the potential consequences and have some strategies already defined for how you're going to mitigate those risks. Because anyone can get excited about a new framework or some new tool, like whether it's a cloud service or some other architecture. But good engineers have to know when is the right time to actually implement and integrate these options into our current ecosystem. Like it's not just about what you want to use, it's about what you can actually manage using safely. How often do you have to SSH into a server? So this was very interesting. I've been thinking about this over the last week. But in my six years of experience, I have never needed to remotely access a production server. And I've done it before. I've done it for a personal project. I've connected to different computers in my house remotely just to see if I could. I've connected to instances that I provisioned myself. But working inside of a Fortune 500 company or some other large enterprise, that's not something that is just commonplace. Because these services and the products that the business provides are so important. Because risk management is such a big consideration, you're not going to allow just some random developer, and I'll say random because you are random inside of a country company with thousands of employees. No matter how good you are, you are a random employee. Having that person being able to directly connect to your production server, to directly connect to directly connect to production data. That is a big no-no. Honestly, in most companies, most most industries, you're going to get fined if that's even a possibility. If it's possible for someone to just access a database or access user data in production without any type of controls or auditing or logging in place, that's going to definitely result into some type of regulatory issue. Whether it's a payments and card compliance issue, like for data security, or if it's some type of privacy issue from GDPR or some of the other California policy laws or privacy laws, that's not something that you can just do, nor should you, right? If you're making changes directly to production, like let's say you are changing a file path, or you are updating some data inside of a table. If you're doing this like just off of your keyboard, that is potentially an issue that could cause some type of a drift between the architecture that we have defined and documented and what's actually deployed. And that type of drift is where risk loves to thrive. And risk in terms of cybersecurity, like someone being able to piggyback off of your connection because we have that port open for people to SSH into our production instance, and they could maybe uh you know breach our system somehow that way, or just from a misconfiguration that you do, that it might even be the right configuration. Let's say you need to do it in order to actually secure the environment, but if you don't have it defined anywhere, the next time we have to deploy this infrastructure, we may not use that configuration that you so helpfully define because it's been defined nowhere, it's only it was only updated in that one instance. So these are like the risks that come from SSH. And I heard a lot, like so. When I first thought about this question, I ended up asking Reddit because I was like, you know, is it even something that people do? Like, is that a real thing? I know it's a real tool. I know SSH is real, but like, are people really connecting to their production servers or their production applications with like no other uh controls in place? So some of the feedback I got was that definitely smaller companies make use of this more often, and it's it's something that no one actually is saying is a good thing. Like we all know that change management is important, configuration management is important. Like we all know that. Like having baselines that are documented, having infrastructure as code, GitOps. We all understand how important these things are, but in some organizations where you have to move fast with limited resources and limited controls, you could just get it done. You can make it work and it'll work. And it's something that you know a lot of people were saying, like, yeah, we do it, we don't do it often. And if you're finding yourself doing, like, let's say you're pulling some specific piece of data very often off of your production servers, then it's almost better to create a script for that, because that script can at least be documented, automate, audited, and at least you know, past different members of the team to make sure that we're doing the same thing correctly. But at some point, if it's really becoming super common, you should at least try to invest in automating that process. Because every time you have a human going in and doing something on your production instance is possibly a chance for them to make a mistake and you know cause an incident, cause some type of disruption. And the more frequently that is happening, the more operational risk that is being created. So it really should be like an exception versus a norm to ever have to connect to your production servers. And I'm not saying SSH is not valuable, you really might have to do it at some point. It's definitely an essential skill for Linux admins, you know, some infrastructure engineers, DevOps, and cybersecurity professionals, but you gotta make sure you know what you're doing when you're doing it, and you gotta have some type of practices in place to make sure that this is not just how we do it. This is just this is what we do, right? Right? That's not ever gonna be okay. It's not a strategy. What is a server? So a server is a system that provides a service to another computer or client. That client can be an application that is accessing the server directly, or the application directly, it can be a human who is accessing the server through some type of UI, or it could be anything in between, really. Just some type of client that makes use of the services provided by that server. And those servers can run on a physical computer, it can run on your home laptop, it can run on a virtual machine, it can run on a serverless platform, it can run inside of Kubernetes, which is a cluster, right? Or a pod, it can run inside of a pod inside of a Kubernetes cluster. There's a lot of ways to run a server. Something to keep in mind is that it's a server is the back end. Whenever you hear back end, that just means the server. This is the part of the application that people don't usually see. It may be the driving factor behind how this button emails people, behind how this authentication or login works. Like it's handling a lot of the heavy lifting that doesn't need to be cared about, that the client doesn't need to concern themselves with because it's handled on the server or on the back end. And something like, so I would say to clarify is that the server isn't necessarily the code, the application code that you write. Technically, your code can run and function through any type of interface. That interface could be a CLI tool, that interface could be an API, that interface could be maybe just something that you run a script and it pulls some data from a database, or like just doing that inside of as part of the application and code. The part that makes it a server is that that service is now accessible to the client, that they can actually consume the resources or consume the processing that the server is actually providing to them. And most servers are accessible on the web. That's when you'll hit like a web server, and that's where your UI applications are hosted. That's where your APIs that are on the internet are hosted. And this is where you typically think of a web server, but a lot of them can also be hosted locally or inside of a private network if there's no need for that server to be accessible to the internet. And that might be like an email server, that might be a DNS server, that could be something that you're running inside of your internal network that's only accessible to your internal employees. And another thing to clarify with a server is that an API is not the server, the API is the application. A lot of the frameworks that we use, whether it's Spring Boot or Fast API, Spring Boot definitely, Express.js, Go's standard HTTP library, or if you're using their GIN framework, like they will expose a web server for you that you can use to make your code accessible. But the web server itself is different from the code itself. The API is not the server, the server is just the means of communicating with the application code itself, and it just makes it with these frameworks much easier to get started and up and running without having to spin up your own server in the business logic yourself. But it's definitely important to understand the difference between a server and a client and what we actually use servers for. These servers can do a number of different things, they need to be configured in specific ways, they need to be protected, they need to be made reliable, whether it's through vertical scaling or horizontal scaling, you have to make sure that your server can actually provide the accessibility, the confidentiality, and the integrity that your clients are expecting. Why is understanding technology becoming as important as it is to understand money? So in 2026, you are interacting with technology and digital services 24-7 at this point. There are various mediums that we use to integrate and interact with technology. That could be your phone, that could be your car, that could be when you're paying your phone bill, and even your TV, that is probably internet accessible and streaming some type of video or movie that you're watching. Right? That technology is being used to connect you to some of the services you rely on, whether it's your utilities and your ability to vote, your ability to get paid and pay your bills. Technology is something that you cannot kind of separate yourself from today. And so if you want to ensure that you can provide security to your own lifestyle and your own life, and potentially innovate, come up with new ideas, come up with new strategies for solving problems in your life, then it's important for you to understand the systems that you are integrating or interacting with daily, systems that are around you because you are relying on these. Like it's almost like water at this point. Again, going back to the hierarchy of needs, it's no longer a luxury to make sure you have access to the internet. The internet is the thing that allows you to do most of the things that you need to do, even from relationships. Maybe 30 years ago, most people were not finding their significant other online. Today, I'm sure, and I have to check these numbers, but at least 50% of people are finding their partners through the internet, whether it's through an app, like a dating app, or some other social app that they're just connecting with people and finding them that way. So it's important to understand how your relationship with technology is going to impact your ability to access the different things that you need to access, whether it's people, opportunities, or anything else. And the same with money. If you don't understand money, it's going to either negatively, usually, usually negatively impact your ability to have access to some of the things that you need. And that could be your inability to budget, that could be your inability to understand how to count, that could be your inability to uh either know how to save or invest. Like if you or if you only save not knowing how to invest, right? If you don't understand some of these edge cases that are important when using these tools, because money is just a tool, the same way technology is just a tool, whether it's the computer or the internet or your smartphone or AI, it's just a tool, right? Same way money, whether it's inside of a retirement account, whether it's inside of your checking account, whether it's cash like hard cash with coins, dollar bills, that's just a tool versus your credit card, which is just another tool for managing or using and interacting with your finances. If you don't understand these tools in a society where these tools are synonymous with the resources that you need, it puts you behind. So you have to understand that. You have to understand, and and I say understand it not from being a software engineer perspective all the time. Like everyone is not going to be a software engineer, everyone is not going to develop the technology itself. But everyone should understand what a router is, everyone should understand how the internet works, everyone should understand how AI comes up with its answers, how these different computers work. Like, that's just good hygiene. That's just like at some point it's going to be common sense. Your ability, like same way it is your ability to read, right? You just need to know how to do this because if you don't know how to do this, it limits your ability to do the other things that really are important to you. And so that technology literacy is definitely something that I strongly advise everyone to invest in and to encourage your people, whether it's your children, your significant other, your family, encourage them to develop that literacy so that they can make better decisions with the technology around them, whether it's for security, whether it's for efficiency, right? Like maybe you don't need to pay for a subscription service to use whatever you know photo sharing app that you're using. Maybe you can use S3 buckets. There's a free tier that most people will never hit inside of their like for their use cases. There's ways to do that. There's ways to protect your privacy. Maybe you can't connect the device directly to a VPN. But it's possible to connect your router to a VPN. And so that might be an option for you if you want to maintain your privacy and your data security, even from IoT devices. A lot of these devices are not well protected. They weren't well designed to prioritize security. So you have to think about how you deploy those devices on side of your network. Does that mean putting them on their own subnet that doesn't have access to the internet? Does that mean logging every connection that those devices make? These are the decisions that you can make once you understand the technology and the way these systems work around you. What is the document object model? So the document object model or the DOM is a front-end specific software engineering concept. I'll let's even say not even the concept, it's a it's a technology, a tool, that is useful for creating dynamic websites and even for browser automation. The DOM is the in-memory representation of the HTML code that your website or your web service is going to send to you. And let me break that down a little bit, right? So when you get a website, when you go to a website, that web server is going to send you an HTML page. That HTML page is going to include all of the elements that exist for that page. It could be an image, it could be a link, it could be some text. It's going to send all of that back to your device. Now your device is going to see that HTML file and is going to say, how do I visualize? How do I paint what this server is telling me to paint onto my computer, onto this computer? And it uses the DOM to manage that painting. That's how it knows that this picture comes before this text, or vice versa. It creates that inside of the memory of your browser for every page that you visit. And then using that, any types of scripts, whether it's a browser automation script with playwright or some other type of like maybe React or single page application or JavaScript, they're going to instead of updating the HTML file, they're going to update the DOM that your browser is running when it needs to make changes, whether it's to change a value on the page or inside of your browser, or to get some data from the browser. It's going to directly go to the DOM versus the HTML file that was pulled from the web server. So it's something to understand how the DOM works because it can help drive any types of automation that you have in mind. And it's important to understand that when you're building a single-page application, how that relationship works with your browser, the framework, and the client itself, and how how things are being uh you know shown and how people are interacting with your application and whatever it does. Even from a security perspective, some information that's in the DOM might not be something that you want to. I don't think you can hide anything inside of the DOM. So if that's the case, you shouldn't put anything that's a secret inside of the DOM. It needs to be inside of a cache or a secure cache inside of your browser itself, like, or you might use some other encrypted value or encrypted database that maybe is potentially stored inside of your server, and the only way the client can access it is by sending a request and the server handles any type of validation and updating of those values. So something to keep in mind for any type of front-end application, front-end security, front-end development that you're doing. It's going to be very important. That's what we have for the QA for this week. Quick mindset tip before we get out of here is that boredom is not always a problem that needs to be fixed. Sometimes it's okay to just be bored. Sometimes it's okay to just sit in silence and think about your thoughts and monitor your thoughts. Monitor how you feel, whether it's physically, mentally, emotionally. A lot of people can't tolerate being bored. So instead of being bored, they'll choose to go put themselves around people that they don't need to be around. They'll choose to put themselves in situations that they don't need to be in. They'll choose to make decisions that are more emotional versus this is a good decision. And so your ability to tolerate boredom is going to make you less easy to distract. It's going to make you more able to stick with your long-term goals, and it's going to make you a better person in relationships because you're not going to look for relationships just for novelty, just for excitement and entertainment. You're going to look at every relationship, every thing that you do with more intentionality. You're going to think about, hey, do I really need to be here? You're going to think about what do I really feel right now? How do I fix that? Or how do I change that if if it needs to be fixed? And that clarity is something that you get most often inside of boredom. And sometimes boredom means you have to be alone, right? You can it's hard to be bored with someone else because you can always talk to them. They can entertain you. But if you're alone, you have to be able to I don't even say entertain yourself, but you have to be able to understand that you don't have to escape being alone with your thoughts. If your thoughts are so challenging that you cannot be alone with them, then maybe you need to seek help. In all honesty, you should be able to just sit and say, hmm, maybe I don't like the thought that I'm thinking. Maybe I do like the thought that I'm thinking. Maybe it's like it's okay to just sit in quiet and not try to fill every moment with some type of you know, something, whether it could be eating. Some people eat when they're bored, some people, you know, cause problems when they're bored, bored. But you can also find other healthier options, you know, to handle your boredom. It could be going for a walk, it could be drawing, it could be doing push-ups, doing some type of workout. Like that boredom can be a useful tool for you if you let it grow a little bit more, if you curate your boredom, and not just let your boredom send you down paths that you don't even want to be on. That's all we have for this week. I hope you enjoyed the tips. Hope you can learn from the concepts and the ideas that I'm sharing. And I hope that you are able to improve inside of your career, inside of your, you know, your projects and everything that you're looking to build. Quick announcement before I get out of here, I'll say shout-out, not so much announcement. Happy birthday to my mom. I first of all just want to say I love you, mom, mama. You are a great mother, you are an even more amazing person, and I am very grateful to have you as my mom. I hope you are feeling youthful and lovely and just amazing this year around. I hope you feel healthy, and I hope you continue to feel healthy for the next hundred years and beyond. And, you know, happy birthday, mom. Love you. And that's all. My shout out for this week. Peace out to everybody. Happy Sunday, enjoy your week, and good luck.