Notes

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.

MAGA conservatives love Viktor Orbán. But he’s left his country corrupt, stagnant, and impoverished.

We're already seeing signs of it.

What is this Hungarian model they so admire? Mostly, it has nothing to do with modern statecraft. Instead it’s a very old, very familiar blueprint for autocratic takeover, one that has been deployed by right-wing and left-wing leaders alike, from Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to Hugo Chávez. After being elected to a second term in 2010, Orbán slowly replaced civil servants with loyalists; used economic pressure and regulation to destroy the free press; robbed universities of their independence, and shut one of them down; politicized the court system; and repeatedly changed the constitution to give himself electoral advantages.

But the most chilling revelations came from an unguarded moment before the official White House stream began. In footage captured by Bukele’s team, Trump can be heard urging the construction of five more CECOT-style camps, specifically mentioning his desire to send “homegrown” — meaning US citizens — to these facilities

This is beyond scary. You now have a US President openly defying the Supreme Court and threatening to send US citizens to what essentially are concentration camps. We shouldn’t be sending anyone to El Salvador, full stop. The fact that the current administration is sending people there without any kind of due process, and is now considering sending citizens there as well should be raising every single alarm bell.

If you don’t see all of this as one of the darkest days in American history, in which the President is openly embracing disappearing people without due process in the name of “liberty,” you are a part of the problem. Fascism has risen in America, and it is being aided by a foreign dictator whom Trump admires.

Couldn’t say it better myself.

Probably the single most important lesson I’ve learned in my career, the thing that I would argue is the hallmark of “experience”, is understanding just how much work it takes to turn a working program into a viable product. It’s why developer estimates are so notoriously optimistic - and why experienced developers are so notoriously cynical.

Experience teaches so much.

One of the genuinely positive things about tools like Copilot and ChatGPT is that they empower people with minimal development experience to create their own programs. Little programs that do useful things - and that’s awesome. More power to the users.

But that’s not product development, it’s programming. They aren’t the same thing. Not even close.

Let’s be real: we would rather make our products in the USA. Doing business in China is hard: a different language, a different culture, a different legal system, and a very long and expensive plane flight every time you have to pop over to help fix what’s gone wrong. So why don't we make keyboards in the USA instead—and why don’t the vast majority of consumer electronics manufacturers, be they big or indie?

Most of our electrical components are made in China. Sometimes we’ll use or consider components not made in China—and they’re made in Japan, Taiwan, or Germany. The USA doesn’t make the components we need.

We’re a small company making niche products; we don’t have the volume to justify opening our own factory. We definitely don’t have the capital to do it. We rely on contract manufacturing, where we pay a network of factories to make products to our specifications, without us owning the machinery or hiring the workers ourselves.

I think there are many companies who would like to be able to make their goods in America, but the economics just don't work out. Anyone who thinks that re-shoring manufacturing to America is simple, easy, or cheap are deluding themselves.

I regret to tell you that there is no grand plan. There’s not even a proper conspiracy. It’s happening because Trump is an idiot and has filled his administration with fellow idiots and yes men. They’re just dumb fucking people, careless people, people who reject the notion of expertise as a liberal conspiracy, who don’t understand how the world works, and who don’t care when they break things.

I really have nothing more to add. This administration is just disaster after disaster. In this case, they're just causing so much harm unnecessarily.

Real people are going to have their lives destroyed. The economy isn’t just a series of numbers, it’s real people. People will lose their businesses, their jobs, their savings. Children will go hungry in America (and many other countries) because of this. We’re killing jobs and growth and markets in service of one delusional idiot’s resentment of foreign trade. And I hate even more the parade of sycophants who still try to dress it up as some sort of grand strategy. There’s nothing behind the curtain. The emperor has no clothes. He’s just a dumb idiot and you will keep being wrong about him until you incorporate this fact.

Perhaps most importantly, the actual announcement and implementation of these tax increases has made the incompetence and thoughtlessness of this administration even more obvious. The nonsensical “reciprocal” tariff rates published on April 2 were, as best as anyone can tell, generated by a chatbot. Officials repeatedly lied about how the rates were calculated, claiming that each economy’s “tariff and non tariff barriers” policies were quantified individually, when all they did was use a simple-minded formula based on bilateral trade balances in goods with the U.S., which imply nothing about anything. It is becoming increasingly difficult for the administration’s apologists to claim that there is some grand strategy here, or a secret plan, or a complex design that outside observers are simply failing to understand.

And most importantly:

The tariff hikes will harm Americans, they will harm people in the rest of the world, and they will likely fail to accomplish whatever they are supposed to do.

Trump's tariffs make no sense as an economic policy, but they are familiar to anyone who's spent time around organized crime (like, say, Trump)

...

This isn't capitalism – it's gangsterism. It's a system that will annihilate trillions of dollars in value to put billions of dollars in the pockets of Trump and a few of his cronies – at the expense of all the other rich people.

What a nice business you have there. It would be a shame if something were to happen to it.

This wasn’t some minor technical slip-up that just needs a policy reminder. This was top officials deliberately choosing to conduct classified military planning on unauthorized systems. The fact that they accidentally included a journalist just exposed what they were doing — but the underlying violation was using Signal in the first place.

And here’s what should really keep you up at night: we only know about this because they happened to add a journalist who went public about this single chat. How many other sensitive conversations are happening on Signal or other unauthorized platforms? How many other “accidental” additions might have gone unnoticed? How many foreign intelligence services are already exploiting this administration’s casual approach to operational security?

Let’s put this in perspective: this is the same Trump team that turned “but her emails” into a movement over Hillary Clinton’s private email server. We were critical of Clinton’s server too — it was a legitimately bad security practice. But what we’re seeing here makes Clinton’s server look like amateur hour.

Clinton used a private server for mostly unclassified State Department business, with a handful of retroactively classified emails found in the mix. These guys are literally planning military strikes over Signal, complete with operational details so sensitive that journalists won’t even publish them. And they’re doing it specifically to dodge both security protocols and federal records laws.

The private server versus Signal distinction matters too. Clinton’s setup, while improper, was at least a dedicated system. These officials are just using a consumer app, making it virtually impossible to properly archive communications as required by law. They’re not just mishandling classified info — they’re deliberately choosing tools that help them hide their tracks.

What Clinton did was not good. This, on the other hand, is so much worse.

But there’s a user-centric point to be made here too: when you re-invent the look, appearance, and functionality of basic form inputs for every website you’re in charge of, that means every user is forced to encounter inconsistent form controls across the plethora of websites they visit.

This is one of the many reasons it is useful to stick with more standard controls. Between accessibility and everything else, knowing and recognizing standard controls can make it easier for users everywhere to fill out forms.

Even the most motivated person engaging with an interface is more distracted than they realize and has less cognitive bandwidth available than they’re aware of. We’re designing for humans who are juggling multiple tabs, notifications, and interruptions — even while actively trying to focus on our application.

I like to think I normally do a good job focusing on what I’m working on, but we all get distracted or pulled away by some random thought or tangent. Simplifying controls and user experience, while not always easy, can be so beneficial to us all.