Notes

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.

A great piece by Cory Doctorow and his conclusion is damning.

Trump and his fascist movement wont't let up on their assault against institutions that support free inquiry, care, justice and openness. Rolling over for them now will not keep you safe tomorrow. But with every betrayal, these institutions alienate more and more of the public, without whose support they are ultimately doomed. Supporters will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no supporters.

This is outrageous regardless of criminality. Even if any of these people have committed some as-yet-unknown, as-yet-unproven crime, covertly whisking them away to another country's torture chambers without due process is the kind of lawless cruelty that makes me want to believe in a retributive hell. Coupled with this administration's targeting of trans people, its antisemitism, its incarceration of Mahmoud Khalil for his support of Palestine, its insistence that "diversity, equity, and inclusion" are four-letter words, and its decimation of a federal workforce that has been a pillar of the black middle class, it's easy to see what the Trump administration is trying to build: a country where everyone outside the umbrella of Christian nationalist white supremacy is not only a potential target of the state, but also has no legal recourse to protect themselves.

We all need to stick up for each other. The 2024 election results damaged my belief that it's possible to score political wins by appealing to empathy, and it's clear that the ruling class has none, but it remains important to me that we do not lose our own.

The Declaration wasn’t the end of America’s moral journey but its beginning. It established a standard against which we could measure our failures and toward which we could direct our aspirations. It created a language of liberty that marginalized people would later use to demand their rightful place in the American project.

This document, this Declaration of Independence was the beginning of a radical idea that human civilization had never seen before: that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, not from divine right or brute force or inherited privilege. That all people are created equal—a claim that would repeatedly challenge America to expand its understanding of who counts as “all.”

That it now sits in the office of a man who has no appreciation for any of this is quite frankly hard to take. A man who has explicitly called for the “termination” of constitutional rules, who has claimed “absolute immunity” from prosecution, who has said “I am your retribution”—phrases that echo precisely the kind of monarchical authority the Declaration was written to reject.

Carr, again, could be doing any number of things to actually help markets function or improve consumer welfare. Instead he’s harassing a streaming TV provider he has no authority over for not carrying a religious channel not all that many people watched in the first place. This again aligns pretty well with the MAGA mantra that they believe in “free speech,” but only if they agree with what’s being said.

This is what gets me the most about this. Carr and company could be working to make sure every American has access to high speed internet, but instead they’re attacking first amendment rights.