Notes

The tragedy is, none of this is necessary. Once upon a time, we had a fast, stable, resilient web. But we replaced it with a JavaScript cargo cult.

Now it takes four engineers, three frameworks, and a CI/CD pipeline just to change a heading. It’s inordinately complex to simply publish a webpage.

This isn’t evolution. It’s self-inflicted complexity. And we’ve normalised it – because somewhere along the way, we started building websites for developers, not for users.

At the same time, JavaScript stopped being just a front-end language. With the rise of Node.js, JS moved server-side, and with it came a wave of app developers entering the web ecosystem. These weren’t web designers or content publishers. They were engineers, trained to build applications, not documents. And they brought with them an architecture-first mindset: patterns, state management, dependency injection, abstracted logic. The result? A slow cultural shift from building pages to engineering systems – even when all the user needed was to load an article.

We’re burning user attention, developer time, and business resources to simulate interactivity that nobody asked for.

JavaScript should be the icing. Not the cake. And certainly not the oven, the recipe, and the kitchen sink.

The marginal cost of adding new software is approaching zero, especially with LLMs. But what is the price of understanding, testing, and trusting that code? Higher than ever.

LLMs reduce the time it takes to produce code, but they haven’t changed the amount of effort required to reason about behavior, identify subtle bugs, or ensure long-term maintainability. That work can be even more challenging when reviewers struggle to distinguish between generated and handwritten code or understand why a particular solution was chosen.

What actually happens isn't replacement, it's transformation. Technologies that promised to eliminate the need for technical expertise end up creating entirely new specializations, often at higher salary points than before. The NoCode movement didn't eliminate developers; it created NoCode specialists and backend integrators. The cloud didn't eliminate system administrators; it transformed them into DevOps engineers at double the salary.

It's also worth thinking about the security implications of code generated. It takes a lot to make sure key systems are secure, vulnerabilities fixed, and threat vectors analyzed and defended against. AI can't do that for you.

Here's what the "AI will replace developers" crowd fundamentally misunderstands: code is not an asset—it's a liability. Every line must be maintained, debugged, secured, and eventually replaced. The real asset is the business capability that code enables.

If AI makes writing code faster and cheaper, it's really making it easier to create liability. When you can generate liability at unprecedented speed, the ability to manage and minimize that liability strategically becomes exponentially more valuable.

And now the million dollar quote.

But there's something deeper happening with this particular transformation. Unlike previous technological shifts that primarily changed how we implement solutions, AI-assisted development is highlighting a fundamental truth about software engineering that has always existed but is now impossible to ignore:

The most valuable skill in software isn't writing code, it's architecting systems.

And as we'll see, that's the one skill AI isn't close to replacing.

If you vote for this party for any reason—if you prioritize any policy preference over the preservation of constitutional democracy—you are complicit in the destruction of the American republic. You are helping to dismantle the system that makes political disagreement possible in the first place.

The constitutional conservatives didn’t abandon the Republican Party. The Republican Party abandoned them. What remains is the advancing edge of American fascism dressed up in constitutional rhetoric.

Two plus two equals four. There are twenty-four hours in a day. And anyone who can’t see that the modern Republican Party represents an existential threat to constitutional democracy is either willfully blind or actively complicit in its destruction.

It’s gotten to the point where I’m done trying to pretend that not all those who vote for the GOP are part of the problem. I look at everyone who supports the current Republican party as the problem.

The propagandists understand that dramatic images of real violence are far more effective than fabricated ones. A video of someone hurling concrete at police is genuinely disturbing and naturally generates strong emotional responses. But that same video, stripped of context about scale and containment, repeated endlessly across multiple platforms, creates the impression of systematic breakdown rather than isolated criminal behavior being addressed through normal legal processes.

The crucial element is decontextualization. Videos of specific incidents circulate without time stamps, location markers, or scale indicators. A thirty-second clip of one intersection becomes representative of an entire city. Social media algorithms, designed to maximize engagement, naturally boost content that triggers fear and outrage while burying anything that might provide proportion or context.

Mainstream media, trapped in its own engagement-driven incentives, amplifies rather than clarifies. Headlines speak of “widespread unrest” and “violence erupting across Los Angeles” without mentioning that we’re talking about incidents covering perhaps twenty square blocks in a city spanning over 500 square miles. The scale of the actual disturbances gets lost in the imperative to make everything sound dramatic and urgent.

The result is a population that believes they’re witnessing something far more serious than reality warrants. Americans in other states, consuming this curated content, develop the impression that Los Angeles is in the grip of systematic breakdown requiring extraordinary intervention. The manufactured crisis becomes indistinguishable from a real one in the minds of people who have no baseline for comparison.

Once more, we are being failed by the mainstream media and their inability to actually speak truth to power.

The media’s role in this transformation cannot be understated. By treating manufactured crisis as genuine emergency, by amplifying decontextualized images without providing scale or proportion, by framing military deployment as reasonable response rather than constitutional violation, mainstream outlets become unwitting accomplices in their own irrelevance. When reporters present authoritarian power grabs as ordinary policy disagreements, they help normalize what should be shocking.

This decontextualization leads to people not being able to fully grasp the scale, or lack thereof, allowing for authoritarianism to gain a foothold.

We are witnessing the live construction of an authoritarian consensus through carefully orchestrated deception. A few broken windows and isolated acts of violence in Los Angeles became the justification for crossing a constitutional line that previous generations would have died to defend. And it worked precisely because most Americans have lost the ability to distinguish between genuine emergency and manufactured crisis.

Let me be clear: It fucking matters. Truth matters. Documentation matters. Fighting corruption matters. That accountability seems out of reach right now doesn’t change that. When we internalize the belief that nothing can change, we stop demanding change. When we accept corruption as normal, we stop fighting it. When we dismiss documentation of wrongdoing as pointless, we give wrongdoers exactly what they want: permission to continue unchecked and with no record of their actions.

I understand the despair in these kinds of responses. We’ve all watched impeachments fail, courts falter, institutions buckle, and politicians repeatedly trade away democracy for their next campaign check. But giving up on the very idea that truth and morality matter is not just cynicism, it’s surrender.

It's too easy to give up in these depressing and scary times. Don't give in.

And in doing so he will hand the future of space exploration over to other countries. As planetary scientist and former NASA Mars science operations team member Tanya Harrison put it, “The fact that the U.S. is turning inward and potentially set to decimate the science from its own space program while China is offering up its recently returned lunar samples for researchers around the world to analyze speaks volumes as to how the tides of science are going to shift.”

Trump is handing over America’s scientific preeminence to other countries, including our enemies.

And it’s all for a lie: this saves money in the sense that starving to death saves on your food bill. Study after study has shown that for every dollar we put into NASA, we get more than a dollar back out, sometimes much more than a dollar.

Yet another disaster from the Trump administration putting us behind the rest of the world

Valuable work and meaning is not derived from what AI makes us (apparently) faster at: generating code. Meaning and value in software development is actually created through the impact of building things that makes human lives better, or easier, or slightly less bad.

What’s becoming clear is that the mass adoption of AI is shifting the focus away from human-centered software solutions that provide meaningful value, and is reducing the entire industry to just the tools at its disposal. Just generate the code, bro. Just ship one more app, bro.

I take pride in my work and try to create the best product for my users. I'd be lying if I said I always succeeded, but I'm always striving to do better. How many of the vibe coded apps will just be cookie cutter bland apps that might do the job, but feel more like some boring utility. Boring can be good, but sometimes some nicer touches can provide real value.

There’s nothing wrong with being inexperienced; we all have to start from somewhere. But we can’t rely on tools as a shortcut to gain valuable experience. Experience takes time to develop, and your tools are only as good as your fundamental knowledge and skills. If you skip the knowledge and skills part, and if you fail to learnabout what you’re doing and the implications of how you’re doing it and the human value you have the potential to deliver, then you have little hope of building human value into your software.

I sometimes wonder what junior developers are going to lose by not starting with the basics and just getting AI to build things. It might be all fine and dandy when the generated code works, but what happens when users inevitably find weird edge cases? Or what if there's a bug? From my own personal experience, I've gained plenty of experience and knowledge from debugging and figuring out where code goes awry. I'm not saying that every developer needs to follow my path or not use any new tooling, but I wonder how much learning is done when you enter some commands into a prompt and code is spit out.

We simply need to start thinking through the implications of a fundamentally better approach to AI, and to understand that all of these things are extremely possible. Consumer-grade AI tools that are actually good do not have to be a hallucination.

This was a good list looking at how we might see better AI.

Programming is an activity, but it’s also a feeling. For those of us who actually enjoy programming, there is a deep satisfaction that comes from solving problems through well-written code, a kind of ineffable joy found in the elegant expression of a system through our favorite syntax. It is akin to the same satisfaction a craftsperson might find at the end of the day after toiling away on well-made piece of furniture, the culmination of small dopamine hits that come from sweating the details on something and getting them just right. Maybe nobody will notice those details, but it doesn’t matter. We care, we notice, we get joy from the aesthetics of the craft.

There really is something to be said about seeing the output of the code you write. Being able to see your code transform into a website or application is amazing.

Nearly all subscription-based car features rely on devices that come preinstalled in a vehicle, with a cellular connection necessary only to enable the automaker's recurring-revenue scheme. The ability of car companies to charge users to activate some features is effectively the only reason the car’s systems need to communicate with cell towers. The police documents note that companies often hook customers into adopting the services through free trial offers, and in some cases the devices are communicating with cell towers even when users decline to subscribe.

In an August 2022 email, one detective noted: “In some vehicles, again [it] depends on manufacturer, the vehicle is still doing this despite the lack of an active subscription, and just sending the data back to the mother ship. This could be due to collecting user data for what the manufacturer sells it for, to providing this data to try to sell you on renewing your [subscription] package that lapsed.”

I'm not looking forward to getting my next car...I like my dumb car. I don't need my car constantly sending data to Honda or who knows who else.

“Location data is some of the most sensitive, revealing information that is generated by our devices, including our cars,” the EFF’s Crocker says. “It's extremely revealing of obviously where you go and where you've been, but also all the people you associate with and all the things you're doing. You can paint a very clear picture of someone's life with just a list of all the places they've been in their car. The Supreme Court has made that very clear.”

You'd be surprised how much can be determined about you based on looking at where you go.

A well-built system doesn't need to be brilliant today. It just needs to keep working. It doesn’t need your best day ever; it needs your average day, consistently delivered. You don’t win by doing something heroic once. You win by making it unnecessary.

Slow and steady wins the race.

In a recent White House press briefing, Karoline Leavitt was asked about the upcoming Trump tax cuts bill. Her response:

"This bill does not add to the deficit. In fact according the Council of Economic Advisors, this bill will save 1.6 trillion dollars."

Kai Rysdall, the fantastic host of the Marketplace economic news program calls her out and added some great context in the closing of the episode.

"It is the policy of this program as I have said repeatedly over the years that facts matter. So here are the facts. The president's press secretary is lying. I'll cite a group not inside the White House for evidence. The Penn Wharton Budget Model. The overall deficit increase in the bill as approved by various house committees is 4.9 trillion dollars over 10 years. That is offset Penn Wharton and the White House do say, by spending cuts totaling 1.6 trillion dollars. So in fact the bill does add to the deficit to the tune of 3.3 trillion dollars, again over 10 years. And just so we're all clear, no tax cut in the history of taxes or cuts to them, has ever paid for itself."

Inside Flock, employees have voiced concern about the Nova product, according to the Slack messages. One pointed to the use of hacked data like the Park Mobile Breach. “I was pretty horrified to hear we use stolen data in our system. In addition to being attained illegally, it seems like that could create really perverse incentives for more data to be leaked and stolen,” they wrote. “What if data was stolen from Flock? Should that then become standard data in everyone else’s system?”

Privacy nightmares feel like they're like a snowball rolling downhill.

But deep down, all I want for my personal website is to give back to the web. I want anyone, regardless of skill level, to inspect elements, understand the structure, and learn from readable code. And I am fully aware my code isn’t perfect. It’s old and there’s a lot of room for improvement.

For now, I am happy to carry on with this approach. My imperfect and unpolished code on my personal website isn't the full reflection on my technical abilities or knowledge of web development standards. It’s a constant draft where my handwriting is legible and where I want optimization takes a backseat. It’s where I use the little free time I have to actually write on it and prioritise the experiments I want.

Ana articulates well how I feel. Learning website development back when I first started, being able to view the source was a great crutch to see how to do things. I experiment with my site, it doesn't have to be perfect, just mine.

It’s about much more than central bank reserves. It’s a about controlling the global financial system. It’s what trade is denominated in, what foreign loans for many countries are denomined in. Why is it good for the United States? The obvious reason is that it allows us to borrow cheaper than we would otherwise, probably half a percent to a percent. And when I say cheaper, it’s everything. Mortgage loans, car loans across the board because the dollar is very liquid. There are deep markets in it. People wanna hold it and it makes it cheaper. And by the way, when you move towards a tri-polar system, let’s say the Euro and the renimbi, taking up some of the dollar’s market share, that’s gonna bring that interest rate we pay up. But there are many other things.

...

But there’s something much deeper than that that I people are less aware of. Because the dollar is so central to everything. Many, many financial transactions which happen in far-flung places end up circulating through the United States before they clear. So when you see a modern spy, CIA, and when you say the US always have this ridiculously good information about everything, a part of that is our financial data. Of course the Chinese hate it, the Russians hate it. The Iranians hate it but believe me, the Europeans hate it They would like their privacy. They don’t really want Donald Trump to see as much as he can. I guess one other thing I should have said, it maybe is a corollary of being able to borrow cheaper. When there’s a crisis, the pandemic, financial crisis, the US can go really big in a way other countries are reluctant because they’re afraid their interest rates will move up and make it painful. That does happen to the United States, but it’s more gentle. So after the financial crisis, there were many complaints the US should have stimulated more and I think probably they should, but it did much more than most other countries. And in the pandemic, it was doing double what other countries were doing. And that’s part of the privilege. Now, why does that matter to an ordinary person? It matters because believe me, next time there’s a crisis, you will feel it that the government can’t do as much. You will feel the pain, just as other countries have to do.

I worked in the Writing Center in college, and whenever a student came in with an essay, we were supposed to make sure it had two things: an argument (“thesis”) and a reason to make that argument (“motive”). Everybody understood what a “thesis” is, whether or not they actually had one. But nobody understood “motive”. If I asked a student why they wrote the essay in front of them, they’d look at me funny. “Because I had to,” they’d say.

Most writing is bad because it’s missing a motive. It feels dead because it hasn’t found its reason to live. You can’t accomplish a goal without having one in the first place—writing without a motive is like declaring war on no one in particular.

This is why it’s very difficult to teach people how to write, because first you have to teach them how to care. Or, really, you have to show them how to channel their caring, because they already care a lot, but they don’t know how to turn that into words, or they don’t see why they should.

Instead, we rob students of their reason for writing by giving it to them. “Write 500 words about the causes of the Civil War, because I said so.” It’s like forcing someone to do a bunch of jumping jacks in the hopes that they’ll develop an intrinsic desire to do more jumping jacks. But that’s not what will happen. They’ll simply learn that jumping jacks are a punishment, and they’ll try to avoid them in the future.

I wonder how much better writers some might be if they had chances to write more about something they want to. I don't remember many chances in school for open writing. Being able to write well is an important skill even for non-writing professions.

Yet business is not back to usual. Even if the tariffs stay paused and prohibitive ones on China come down, trade barriers and uncertainty will remain. Those risk being to America Inc what Brexit was to uk plc—a persistent drag on growth. In a new working paper Nicholas Bloom of Stanford University and colleagues find that by 2024 Britain’s exit from the eu had cut productivity by 3%, business investment by 12-20% and gdp by 6-9%. American ceos should put away their pandemic diaries and chat to their British counterparts instead. They won’t like what they hear.

Having the economy be at the whim of someone who doesn't understand economics and has no interest in learning is a dangerous thing.

I think we exist to bring new things into existence. If you ask me, to the extent there is a meaning of life, that’s it. We exist to create. It lights us up in a way nothing else does, putting something new into our world—and in doing so, fundamentally changing it, in whatever way, however big or small.

What you create, and how you do it, is entirely up to you. That’s the beauty of it.

I love side projects as a tool to help improve my skills, learn something new, and build a tool that might help me solve a problem I'm having. Even if no fully fleshed product ultimately comes out in the end, the creating and learning is fulfilling.

If America’s government degrades the dollar’s role, whether by design or by accident, other countries may try to defend themselves by throwing up barriers to capital and falling back on new and less sophisticated financial networks. Without a true successor, the result would probably be a world of competing currency blocs, inadequate alternatives to Treasuries, barriers to trade and reduced efficiency. The past few weeks have been a taste of such a future—and they have not been pleasant.