I’m kind of amazed how much money can be tied up in things that are not well understood by the vast majority of people who fund those things. Ad networks. Var

I’m kind of amazed how much money can be tied up in things that are not well understood by the vast majority of people who fund those things. Ad networks. Various products from financial institutions. Cryptocurrencies. Heck, even app stores (as a developer, if your app was sold to somebody and Apple/Google’s system was simply broken and somehow they made their cut but you didn’t, how would you even know?). At a certain point, it sure seems that people rely on popularity as proof of proper functionality (i.e. “lots of people seem to use this just fine” = “nothing can go wrong”). In reality, we should be expecting a lot more: asking harder questions, demanding more proof of activities, expecting extremely reliable support, etc. And frankly, a lot of these things should have open-source implementations to make it even easier to ensure that they work the way they claim to.